


Buried Empire

by Jennytheshipper



Category: hilary mantel - Fandom, mary boleyn - Fandom, thomas cromwell - Fandom, wolf Hall, wolf hall series
Genre: F/M, Masturbation, Weirdness, history au, king shaming, most M/F, some slash and pre-slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-07-22 00:13:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 56,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7410793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennytheshipper/pseuds/Jennytheshipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cromwell wins the war but loses almost everything else, including his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Affordable Things

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third (and final) multi-chapter in my Thomas Cromwell AU trilogy, carrying on 3-4 years after the events of _Austin Friar's Way._ It is not strictly necessary to have read the previous two installments, but I think you will get more out of it, if you do. A new chapter is published every other Wednesday.
> 
> The first multi-chapter, [A Month in Calais](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4145793)  
> The Second multi-chapter, [The Austin Friar's Way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5765143)

_And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marshes of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug in to unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future. _  
-Hillary Mantel, _Wolf Hall___

**October 1538**

He sleeps in the attic because it’s easier to heat. The room smells of cat piss and spilled wine. The whole house smells of it, but this room in particular; Marlinspike or some bastard relative of his has visited recently and marked their territory around his make-shift bed: a heap of rags covered with the flag from the courtyard. Liz had stitched the cross of Saint George onto the fine white linen field. He had sent to Spain for the madder rose dye, once, when it seemed such things mattered.

He has been around the house and gathered up everything of use and value. The pile should be bigger. It is not much to show for such an extravagant life: the frame from Mary’s Black Madonna, a map of Yorkshire, a few stubs of candles, miscellaneous plate, two chamber pots, three pens, a dried up jar of ink and a sheaf of paper which had scooted to the back of his desk. 

He takes his battle axe to the walnut paneling in the library and retrieves the last remaining treasure box in Austin Friars -- not that there’s much of material value in it -- apart from the ebony ring box inlaid with the gold initials “T.C.” He pawned the ring months ago to get money to carry on with his search, to print the pamphlets. He supposes Liz’s prayer book might fetch something, the painting is quite fine. 

He leaves the storage cupboard until last, afraid to disturb its ghosts. It is largely untouched though someone has pulled out and carried off the peacock feathers from Grace’s angel wings, leaving only the white muslin backing to hang slack and empty like the arms of a ghostly white mother. The large pointed star and the head of Walter the Seamonster remain in their place to stand guard over the lot. He takes away only the wooden sword of Excalibur, from the Christmas of ‘34 -- for firewood -- though now sitting on his Cross of St. George he finds he can not bear to burn it after all. What if the dragon returns?

Lionel enters, instead, ringing and clinking with bottles.

“What’s in the bag?” he asks.

“Sack! I’ve sack in me sack,” the old drunk wails and laughs for a full ten seconds. Lionel pours out the wine into two gold goblets that they found rolled under the chest in the dining room and serves them on a tarnished silver tray rescued from the cellar. Lionel, a man of unknowable age, whose wine-stain-and-gray beard have witnessed God-knows what dissolution, is king of the squatters. He has told Lionel that he is just old Tom from the kitchens. Old Tom knows where the treasures are buried and will split the loot down the middle.

He feeds his attic fire with the splinters of his library wall. They burn long and hot, making magnificent coal. Too bad they’ve nothing to eat: it is an excellent cooking fire. As he warms himself, he opens the box and peruses its contents. Locks of Anne’s and Grace’s hair fall out. He catches them, draws them up to his nose though their scent and color have long faded. He reads an old letter from Liz, laughing at a joke, long forgotten. “I thought he’d never leave” was the punchline. Liz could never tell it right and the phrase became a sort of code for when one knows they’ve done the wrong thing but carries on anyway. 

He puts the letter away in its place underneath a piece of dried lavender from Anselma’s garden. The final item in the box is a twig, a cutting from a vine in the garden at Calais. He wonders if it would still grow. He has pushed that garden and everything that came with it from his mind. But here, in his hand, is the stem that could start the whole thing over. If there were time. If there were a southern exposure in which to plant it. 

Lionel pours out another drink and he puts the box away, near the head of his bed. He drinks deep, studying the glow reflected on the goblet, and lies back on his cross of St. George. It has been months, perhaps, since he spent such a pleasant evening as this. 

**January 7, 1536**

He lingers in the kitchen before dawn with his baby daughter, Hope, dozing on his knees, back arched, chubby cheeks burbling up at him. He is eating a bun and a piece of ham as a last minute breakfast. They will soon depart for Kenninghall in Norfolk, the seat of Henry Howard. Mary sits near, sleepy-eyed, propped on her arm. They said their goodbyes last night but she wants to see him off. She shakes herself awake and begins fussing with the pin on Henry’s cloak. It is to be his first big journey and his first time away from her in years. The lad keeps jumping up and saying, “well, then, shall we?” at intervals, which provokes a laugh the first time, and admonitions to eat his breakfast after that. 

He, Cromwell, is often enough away from Mary and Austin Friars that she complains that she has had another child -- endured the risk and pain -- for nothing since he’s missing this one’s infancy as well. This is an exaggeration, of course. Hope took her first steps from Mama to Papa and has taken to falling asleep as she has now, sprawled across his lap, while he gingerly works a calculation on a scale nearby. He can strip an abbey of its assets with one hand and not wake her. He will take with him into the north the image of her at the Christmas pageant: dressed as a lamb, pursued by shepard Gregory, toddling across the stage, bleating to the delight of the audience.

There’s a knock at the door and Chapuys is ushered in, his usually pugnacious hat looking doleful: a harbinger of things to come. He, Cromwell, hands the baby off to Mary with a kiss and helps Chapuys into the study, ordering the customary wine and olives. The Ambassador refuses. He can’t take anything. He is sick in the heart and the stomach. It must be serious.

“Thomas, she is dead,” Chapuys sobs. He pats him stiffly on the shoulder in condolence and finds himself suddenly embraced by the Ambassador. He bites back his instinct to push him away. People should really warn you before they do that. “Queen Catherine is dead,” Chapuys continues, wetting his traveling cloak. “They would not let me see her and now she is gone.” 

The Ambassador pulls, away, straightens his hat, smooths, his doublet, looks embarrassed.

“I tried, you know.Anne would not relent for fear that you would conspire with her.”

“Does she think Catherine would raise an army against England? Against her home? What harm could a dying woman do?”

He mumbles that he does not know, but thinks that if the army had come, Catherine wouldn’t have died. No queen dies when there is an army to lead.

Back in the kitchen, Mary has drifted off and the baby has awakened. Hope stands in her sleeping mother’s arms, twisting Mary’s hair in her hand. He picks her up, whispers to her: he will be back before her tooth comes in, before her curls are an inch longer. She comes out with a big stream of talk, nonsense, half words, sounds that could almost make sense, ending with “Da!”

“Da. Yes, that’s right darling.”

Mary wakes up. “What did the Ambassador want?”

He doesn’t bother with the formalities at home. He says, “The queen is dead,” and Mary knows he doesn’t mean her sister. 

She puts her hand to her mouth, expelling a tiny gasp. “Anne will be happier now. That’s something.”

“Perhaps you can go to the anniversary festivities? There will be a tiltyard. You like that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps.”

“Are you sad?”

She shrugs. “I’ve known her almost my whole life. I never loved her. She wouldn’t let you love her like that. But there was a time when she was almost a mother to me. She looked out for us. Despite…”

He leans down to kiss her before she takes Hope from his arms. Henry comes through from the hall to where the servants are waiting with their cloaks.

“Shall we?”

**Three weeks later**

They say farewell to Henry Howard on a dripping morning, moving south through murky lanes and misty bottoms in easy stages for the sake of the boy. He has been glad of the company: his servant Javier is quiet in the extreme except when he can be prevailed upon to play his lute, which is not often. Though he is only ten, Henry is a conversational prodigy, fond of offering up tidbits of information on anything from ecclesiastical history to the operation of siege engines. He is a good buffer against Henry Howard who can be broody and taciturn in the evenings. Their host is now nineteen, scarcely worthy of the epithet “young” anymore. One sees the old Duke’s angular nose in his profile, and hears the father’s voice as well when the son barks out an order to fill the cups. 

Norfolk’s ghost is never far away. He has taken on the bulk of Thomas Howard’s projects for the king, which frequently call for him to travel up north or even to France. Their mission at Kenninghall was to re-establish the broken Treaty of Berwick and to reassure the Northern Lords that they will supplement their garrisons this summer when the Scots are at their most damaging. _Wars are not affordable things, _he’d once said to Henry. His war, as he’s come to think of it, seems to absorb treasure and men and yield no trace of improvement. There is a word for it in one of little Henry’s books on nature: quagmire, a boggy morass that gives way underfoot.__

It seems they are all sinking in mud, like the story old Norfolk told about Henry drowning in the muck, saved by a servant. Who will pull them out when the servant goes in the mire too, he wonders? As he watches little Henry lead his horse, splashing through puddles best ridden around -- as boys are wont to do -- he thinks of Catherine, waiting to be lowered into the Earth at Peterborough, a cut-rate burial to save costs. Mary has written him that Chapuys has refused to go to the funeral since Catherine is not to be buried as a queen. That is all very well for Chapuys, but don’t the dead want to see the crowds of mourners at the side of the road? A chapel full of sighing, keening women? Some sign that they are missed? Or is it as Cranmer said, all those years ago at Henry’s bedside: _the dead do not return to complain of their burial._

Mary also included a letter from Catherine to the king, unopened of course, a final unwanted gift. He is to dispose of it, as he did with all the others, but he opens it first, reads it sitting in the freezing little chamber he is given at Kenninghall. “I commend unto you our daughter, Mary,” she begins. And she keeps commending, on through her final list of grievances, ending with “my eyes wish to see you.” She never gave up hope; she died listening for his messenger or his footfall outside her door. 

Perhaps with Catherine gone, Anne will finally soften toward her sister. Yesterday was the king’s wedding anniversary and, as such, tomorrow is the anniversary of his duel with George Boleyn. He wonders if Mary will go to the anniversary celebrations. Part of him hopes she won’t, hopes she’ll stay home, keep to the house, keep the wifely vigil for his return. If she goes to the palace he might find his bed empty when he returns. Three years have been enough to spoil him, domesticate him, make him unfit for anything but a soft bed and his wife’s hand on his belly in the dark.

The thought of her warm, sleepy, tucked up against him, makes him spur his horse, ticking the miles off, calculating and recalculating the distance left to travel. He plans to spend the evening near Cambridge. From there, it’s no more than a day’s ride home. Tomorrow evening he will walk in with little Henry and she will rush to meet them. He will be wet, unshaven, and hungry and she will kiss him and bring him supper and tell him that she’s missed him and it will be all the sweeter, for those deprivations make us appreciate what we have. 

They are about halfway between Cambridge and Kenninghall when he hears a rider approaching. “Henry, give way,” he calls. ”Whoever it is, they are in too much of a hurry.” The boy brings his horse, Pancho, to a halt on the verge. Javier rides forward and places himself protectively between Henry and the road. 

The rider comes into sight and Javier calls out, “Diego!”

“That’s not Diego, surely. What would he be doing in Cambridgeshire?” 

“No master, it _is_ Diego.” 

Sure enough Diego’s dark skin -- there are maybe two dozen men in the country with such coloring -- and stick-straight black hair are unmistakable even from this distance. 

“Cousin, thank God I’ve found you,” Diego calls, bringing his horse to a stop not far beyond them. There is something very wrong, he thinks, as Diego removes his cap and gives him a little bow. 

“What’s the matter? Where’s your livery?” he asks, noticing a dark patch on the gray uniform where the Cromwell coat of arms has been newly picked free.

“Master Rafe said not to wear the livery, but I had not another doublet for riding.”

“What has happened?” 

Diego looks to the boy and swallows. He knew it. It is something with Mary, oh God.

“The king is dead,” he says in Spanish, still eyeing Henry. 

His first thought is relief. It is not Mary. And then in a split second of recognition, his mind fills with questions, with images of calamity, but all that comes out is one word: “ah.” 

He pulls himself together, asks, “When? How?”

“Yesterday. He fell from his horse before the joust. He hit his head. He was many hours insensible. He never woke again. They say he died in the night.”

He sits for a moment looking down at his own horse. As if the creature might supply him with an answer. 

“Master Rafe has sent your wife and daughters to Italy on a ship this very day. He awaits your instructions.”

He takes a moment to thank God they are safe. He looks over at the boy whose eyes are wide in terror.

“It’s all right, Henry. It’s all right. But we have to get off this road.” He pulls his horse around and points its nose to the north, toward the road they’ve just come down. “Diego, you take Pancho. Your horse is too spent to go much further at that pace, I think.” Diego nods. Javier helps Henry down.

“The boy will ride with me. We are going to ride fast, Henry. Will you be alright?” The boy nods. Javier hands Henry up, and he lifts him onto the front of the saddle. He enfolds him in his cloak, as he did with Rafe all those years before. ‘Well then, shall we?” he says, smiling down. 

“They will be looking for us,” he, Cromwell, says to the others in Spanish. “Follow me.”

+++

He nearly rides past the entrance to the old inn. The driveway is different: -a foreboding hedge screens the building from the road now. The paint is still peeling and there are a few more roof tiles missing, but it is the same place. He turns up the driveway and the others follow. The inn looks deserted and no one comes to see about the horses. He dismounts and tries the door, half-surprised to find it open. He calls out, hullooing into the dim, dusty room.

“Keep yer hair on!” calls a voice from the back.

“Good afternoon Mrs. T,” he says as calmly as he can manage. She lifts the candle up to his face with a squint. 

“Master Cromwell, as I live and breathe. Never thought we’d see you again. You’ve grown ever so important.”

A tight smile. “My business takes me elsewhere these days.”

“My business takes me elsewhere,” she repeats, laughing. Some of Mrs. T’s teeth have gone the way of the roof tiles. “I’ll have to use that one.”

“Mrs. T., we are in need of your stable.”

“Which one?” Another monstrous laugh. “No, but we was ever so happy to hear that you’d taken the girl. Jane, was it?”

“Yes.”

“And how is she, Jane, then?”

“She is well. Very well. As I said we are in need of--”

He is interrupted by a fit of coughing from the corner. One of Mrs. T's girl's sits in the gloom with a large goblet of something in front of her.

"Quiet, over there. I'm with a customer," Mrs. T. Snaps. 

"Sorry," the girl says, clearing her cough with a gulp of whatever is in her cup. 

“I guess I’m her aunty, I suppose. Do tell her that her aunty T wishes her well, eh?”

“I will, I promise. Look about--”

“I never got over her mum going like that. So sudden. We were only half sisters, but that never mattered. Blood’s blood, I say.”

“Yes, me too,” he says, eying the shabby dress, the smoking tallow candle in her hand. Time was she kept up appearances, at least made the pretence of running an inn not a brothel. He pulls out his purse. “Mrs. T., I’m in a hurry.”

“I should say you are, Master Cromwell.”

He counts out three shillings and lays them on the counter. She gasps ever so slightly at the sight of all that cash: a week’s takings for one of her girls. 

“Do you still have horses?”

“Of course we keep horses. I like a ride myself now and again,” she says with a wink. Mrs. T was once famed for her habit of riding astride like a man. He notices her forearms are freckled and strong. She still keeps to her exercise. 

“Well, we are in need of them. And we also require your discretion, Mrs. T. You must forget you saw me.”

“Already forgotten. The “T” is for tact, I always say. Bill!” she calls. “Where is that lazy son of a-- BILL!!”

An old man creaks in from the kitchen. “What do you want?”

“Master -- err, this gentleman is need of some horseflesh. Take him out to the stable.” She makes a gesture of rubbing her thumb and third finger together, universal sign for “he’s rich.” Bill perks up. 

“Excellent sir. How many in your party?”

“Four, though we will make do with three horses.”

“Have to. Only have three at the moment. Bessie got the founders from eating grass.”

He trails along, mumbling sympathetically about Bessie’s founders. Bill starts pushing back the stable door. Javier comes forward and pushes it open all the way. 

“Thank you for your help, Bill,” he says, handing the old man a few coins. “We can take it from here. Will you tell Mrs. T that we’ll be needing provisions as well. Whatever bread and cold meat she has on hand. Some olives or pickles if she has them.” Bill nods and shuffles back across the courtyard.

“Master, did you pay already?” Javier says in disbelief, shaking his head at the condition of the three horses in their stalls. 

He walks over, pats a gray pony on the head. Dust rises up and he fans it away with his glove. “A bit dirty, but rested at least. They will take us where we need to go, I think.” He lifts up the pony’s hoof to inspect it. “Shoes all right. That’s something.”

Javier and Diego busy themselves with the horses. He begins going through his luggage, looking for some clothes for his disguise.

“Henry, we are going to play a trick. Do you want to help us?”The boy nods enthusiastically. “We are going to pretend that I’m Spanish. A merchant of some sort.” He casts his eyes around, resting on a saddle bag full of writing supplies. “A paper salesman, from… Madrid.” He leans over and whispers to Javier. 

“Of course, Master,” Javier says, removing the cross around his neck and handing it to him. He puts on the cross and a hat from one of the saddle bags -- smoke-gray velvet, almost purple, with gold trim. He wore it in Calais the night Mary first kissed him: his lucky hat. “Too bad there’s no feather. That would be the crowning touch, but the hat and the cross might just be enough.” 

“What about me? I don’t speak Spanish.”

“You will pretend to be my servant. A mute. Do you follow?”

“Yes, I understand I can’t talk.”

“It will be a challenge, I know.”

The boy pretends to glare at him a moment before smiling, then takes a breath and is about to speak when he remembers he can’t.

“I should have thought of this weeks ago,” he says with a wink to Javier.

Henry fumes, a look of delight in his eye.

Bill returns with the provisions. Mrs. T comes out in a green velvet hat with a massive ostrich feather. He notes that she has tightened her kirtle, tucked in her bosom. She eyes the horses she’s getting in return for her own three dirty brutes with approval. 

“They’re fast enough, if encouraged. Don’t whip the mare, she’ll only throw you down for your troubles. A good kick in the ribs usually does it,” she says, smiling to Diego who blushes in return. 

“I’ve one more favor to ask you, Mrs. T. Do you know of a back way to Hunsdon?”

“Back up the road three miles, then follow the road marked Bedlar’s Green.”

He says a quick farewell, leaving her in her hat to watch them ride away. When they are out of earshot, Javier rides along side and says, “Master, why are we going to Hunsdon? Isn’t that where Spanish Mary lives?”

“Because it’s the last place anyone will look for me. And if we don’t warn her, my in-laws will have her killed.” 

The Princess’ ancestors had most of Javier’s ancestors tortured and burned. Javier looks like he doesn’t much mind one way or the other if Spanish Mary lives or dies.


	2. No Good Deed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ladies in distress. Cromwell tries to help.

**October 1538**

He wakes to the sound of a deep rumble. Thinking it canon fire or thunder, he scrambles to his feet, kicks over the empty ink pot, curses and stands ready with fists clenched, listening. He hears the noise again:probably something heavy being scraped across a bare wooden floor. He should go back to sleep. There was something there, a dream. He was climbing steadily to a great height. It was unpleasant, terrifying even, and yet a relief compared to reality: his stomach complains of its emptiness, his throat is dry, his hands-- still balled into fists -- are shaking. He tries the bottles scattered around his bed, finds a few drops to wet his lips, but nothing more.

He’ll pull himself together later. Drink first, though. 

Down in the hall, Lionel is heaving his body against the side of a great dresser.

“There you are, Tom. Give us a hand, eh?”

“What for?”

“There is something shiny down there.”

He gets down on all fours, peers under the dresser. There is indeed something gleaming in the dim. “It’s only the mirror. It fell from the wall and broke.” He points to the square of darker paint where the mirror once hung.

“Damn. Should have known. Sorry to wake you.”

“It’s all right. I was having a nightmare.”

“I see that. You look like I feel.”

“I could use a drink.”

“Couldn’t we all.”

“So nothing left in your sack, then?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Never mind,” he says. Turning away to mask his disappointment, he steadies his shaking hands by smoothing them over his threadbare doublet, once his finest gray velvet. If there is a memory connected to it, he can’t think of it now.

“It’s food you should concern yourself with, Tom.”

“Any luck there?”

“As it happens,” Lionel says, setting his sack on the table with a tiny thud. Please God, not another rat. What he wouldn’t give for a piece of cheese or a handful of almonds. 

“Caught fresh this morning,” Lionel says, shaking the bird out onto the table.

“Oh, fuck no, not another pigeon. I’m not plucking and trussing another bird for two mouthfuls of stringy meat.”

“Would you rather it was rat?” Lionel says, sounding offended.

“Frankly, yes. Easier to clean and the eating isn’t so bad once you get past the idea.”

“But you never get past the idea.”

“That’s true,” he says with a sigh. What in God’s name is he doing here? He should be at home with Rafe and Helen, eating breakfast, hearing the city gossip. He will pull himself together today. Finish the pamphlet. Get to the printers again. The last was a cheat: took his money and didn’t distribute the tract. In the old days he would have had the printer taken out and beaten, stripped of his license at least. Put at the bottom of the river if he were in the wrong sort of mood. 

He can write the damn thing himself. If he could only find some ink, get this lot sold, get a drink to stop his hand shaking, get his pamphlet printed, show Rafe he is in earnest, he is not mad. There is yet hope. There must be hope. 

He sends Lionel off to the cellar again, in search of a stray bottle. In the meantime he busies himself with the pigeon. If he had a slow steady fire like last night, it might be worth eating. He finishes putting the bird on the spit and leans it against the wall, picks up his axe and heads down to the library. 

After three or four blows, he is deep into the corner of the great table. He had it built from a single oak from his Stepney lands. The tree was struck by lightning in the summer of 1533 on the night they… He won’t think of that now. The axe crunches into the wood, sending shards flying round the room. He pulls back, drops the axe as if bitten: a splinter is lodged in the soft pocket of flesh between his left thumb and forefinger. He winces, lifts it to his mouth, secures the end of the splinter with his teeth and pulls it free. He hopes he got it all, but he can’t tell. His hand is howling and then there is the blood. He finds a dirty scrap of curtain on the floor and binds it around the wound. That will have to do. Anyway, he’s got his firewood. He gathers it up and trudges back up to his attic. 

There is a figure, a woman standing at the top of the stairs, the morning light behind her. Despite himself, he thinks of the Exchequer at Calais, the morning light streaming in behind a woman’s silhouette at the top of the stairs. The layout is similar to Austin Friar’s: it’s why he felt at home at the Exchequer. The outline, the woman’s body, for a moment…

He hullos and she starts in fright, staring down at the axe in his hand. “Don’t be afraid, Miss. I was only getting some firewood.” She backs away, one foot behind another as if on the edge of a great cliff. He recalls the dream now: he was climbing on a cliff face, a woman stood too near the edge. He was trying to reach her. He walks up a few more steps with his hand out, entreating; she stares in horror at the blood-soaked rag wound around his hand. “It’s all right. I mean no harm. Who are you?”

She says nothing, edges back further, closer to the window. Her face is smooth, unlined, not beautiful, but with large eyes looking out in terror at him.

“How did you come to be here? Did you lose your people, Miss?”

She has edged away as far as she can go. She turns and begins climbing into the window.

“What are you doing? Come down. You’ll get hurt.” The eyes grow bigger, the face distorted. He can’t hear the scream at first. He sees the shape of it in her mouth, feels the vibration of it in the banister beneath his hand. Then the noise of it hits him and he brings his hands to his ears to block the horrible sound. He cradles his whole head in his arms trying to escape it, but it’s no use. When he looks up again, she’s gone: the window is open, creaking as it moves in the breeze. He sits down on the top step, the shadows at the periphery of his vision looming around him, growing, enveloping him. He must lie back and rest a bit. He’s had a shock.

When he comes to Lionel is standing over him, shaking his shoulder. He groans in pain. There is another wound, beneath Lionel’s hand, several months old, not quite healed: a jagged line, crudely sewn up in a tent in a field in Hertfordshire. He puts his left hand up to brush Lionel away.

“What’s this, Tom? You’ve got a bandage.”

“Nothing. A sliver. Did you see her? She jumped, I think.” He manages to wobble to his feet and climb into the window. Someone has shut and latched it. That’s strange. He opens it, leans out, feels the pull of the Earth on him as he looks down at the cobbles below. It is a sheer drop with no ledge. The paving is white, washed clean by recent rains. There is no trace of someone falling. He heaves himself back inside, sitting in the window with his feet dangling over the side. “I could have sworn… Didn’t you hear a scream?”

“I don’t know what you’re on about. I didn’t hear a thing. But then I was down in the study. Found this,” he says, pulling a silver flask out from under his filthy green doublet. “By the look of you, Tom, you could use this more than me.”

He takes the flask, the present from Stephen Vaughan. He remembers the day Vaughan gave it to him. The solid feel of his friend’s embrace. The sound of his voice, bittersweet. They had not quarreled, but things had changed that day. The breach was never really healed and Vaughan joined the Boleyns in the war. Vaughan was dead. He’d seen his body, the trunk-like legs hanging slack, lifeless, the smooth face beneath a grizzled beard, the broad shoulders distorted by armour plate. He’d reached out and closed the staring eyes himself. Left his friend in a pile of corpses in a field in Hertfordshire when he was looking for the boy. He takes a drink from the flask, feels the familiar and welcome burn down the middle of his throat. He exhales caraway. The air in the study that day was perfumed with the smell of it. He looks at his hands. Steady as a rock. 

“Thank you,” he says and takes another deep drink.  
i  
“You needed that.” 

He nods, hands the flask back to Lionel. It could fetch something: it is finely wrought, good silver plate, no seams. But it belongs to the king of the squatters now. It’s only fair.

**January 25, 1536**

They make camp in a meadow near an old hay wagon. Mrs T’s route has no other travelers, nor an inn. Javier builds a fire and they huddle round it with their rations: ham, cheese, olives, and sweet wine that makes his throat burn. He must make sure to water down Henry’s portion.

“What’s happened, Master Cromwell? Why do you speak Spanish and look so afraid?” the boy had whispered as they were riding. He’d told him to wait and he’d tell him later. When they stopped for the night. The boy sits across from him now, munching ham, looking sleepy. 

“The king is dead,” he says quietly. Henry looks up, says nothing.

Some minutes go by and he watches Henry surreptitiously, pretending to stir the fire with a stick. 

“Was he my father? King Henry?”

“I believe so. Yes.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me? I’m not a baby,” Henry says, brow furrowed.

“It was for your safety,” he lies. He’d hoped it would never come to this, hoped that by the time the boy was older the King would have a legitimate heir and there wouldn’t be so much danger. He’d hoped that, perhaps, Anne would soften and recognize Henry, give him a title after her own son was safely delivered. But Anne’s son is far from delivered. He reaches out to Henry, pulls him close, puts his arm around the little body. 

He must consult with himself. He wishes he was back in his study with a decent claret and a bright candle. With those, one might think. He shifts, putting his cloak over the boy’s shoulders to protect him from the damp air.

“What’s going to happen?” Henry asks. Javier and Diego look up, curiously. They want to know as well.

“Well, first we’re going to ground for a bit. Like rabbits. Until we can get our noses in the air. Tell from which direction trouble will come.”

“Aren’t we going home?”

“We can’t go there right now. They’ll be looking for me there. Your mother and your sisters have gone on a trip to visit Uncle Francis in Italy.”

“I wish we could go with them. I like Uncle Francis.”

“Me too,” he smiles.

Javier is prevailed upon to play his lute. Diego sings a _villancico,_ his clear tenor filling the night. They move closer to the dying fire before turning in to sleep a few hours under the old wagon. Henry refuses to crawl under it, afraid there might be spiders.

“There aren’t spiders.”

“Then why are there webs?”

“Those are old. The spiders have all moved away.” Henry looks doubtful. The boy stretches out on a blanket next to the wagon, but changes his mind in the night when it starts to rain. They huddle closer, backs to one another as the wind shifts and blows rain under the edges of the wagon. He lies awake listening to the storm, trying to conjure up a bright candle and a decent claret in his mind. Rafe will have consulted the contingency plans. _If Anne is made Regent, Mary and her children should be gotten to safety abroad. Action to be taken as soon as possible, before ports are closed._

He can assume that Anne is Regent, then. The question is, will she greet him as friend or foe? If George has his way, then foe. If he could just get to her, reason with her. Make her see what’s best for her, what’s best for the kingdom, is what Henry would have wanted. But he knows George has her ear and, with Henry gone, he will return to her bed as well. Any hope of reason is doomed. If she delivers a son, her position will be even further strengthened. 

After Mary Tudor is dealt with, what then? They could head to the Essex coast, hide in the bogs like King Alfred, get a ship from any of the towns along the muddy flats. What if they headed there now, at first light? Let Mary Tudor be damned to her fate? He could live with himself if the Boleyns got to her, but there is no guarantee of that. What if the papists got hold of her first? It would be civil war, the end of everything he’s worked for -- another fifty years before they have a Bible in English. 

The storm dies down. He does his best to shift around and get comfortable in the confined space under the wagon. His feet are cold and he thinks something might be crawling in his hair: a spider, perhaps. He scratches his head as vigorously as he can without waking the others. He settles back down, wills himself to think of his wife, her hand on him in the dark; imagines himself curled around her warmth. Best not to tell her about their trip to warn Mary Tudor. Of course the boy will let it spill anyway. There are no more secrets. 

He wakes to the sound of a bell. Thinking he’s at home, he sits up and cracks his skull on the hay wagon. The source of the sound becomes clear soon enough when he hears a deep moo. An enormous, brown velvet nose snuffles Henry’s bare head. The boy smiles in his sleep, brushing the animal away. 

+++

Javier slows his horse, drops back and lets him take the lead as they near Hunsdon House. They stop on the drawbridge and wait for the guards to spot them. He looks down at his reflection in the shallow moat: it is little more than a puddle.

“Master Cromwell for the Lady Mary,” Henry calls up, looking pleased with himself. The guards take no notice.

“An urgent matter. The king’s business,” the boy shouts.

“The lady is not yet awake,” a guard calls down, sneering.

He, Cromwell, climbs down off his horse and walks to the gate, looks in the hatch, sees two fellows standing around yawning. “See here, I want Jenkins down here in ten minutes or I’ll have the lot of you out on your ears by nightfall,” he growls. Jenkins, the captain of the guard, is roused and brought down to the gate.

“Beg your pardon, sir. We weren’t expecting you,” Jenkins says, opening the gate. They ride through slowly and he studies the interior of the small yard: a crisscross of hedges, a tidy gravel path, and large windows catch the morning sun. A pleasant place, hardly like a prison at all. 

Javier and Diego eye one another nervously. Henry sits alert at the front of the saddle, taking it all in with his blue eyes. Their horses are seen to and they are brought into a tiny, blank ante-chamber: all wooden bench and no fire. 

“I have urgent news for your mistress. I must see her at once.”

“She usually does not rise for another hour,” Jenkins says in a worried tone.

“Then you will have someone wake her gently. But do it now. And with no further delay, I’m warning you.” Jenkins skitters out the door, promising to send someone to build a fire.

They wait. Henry paces, humming to himself.

“Can you stop that, please?”

“What?”

“The humming. The pacing. All of it.”

The boy flops down on a bench and begins kicking his heels rhythmically until a warning look silences that as well. A servant comes to build a fire, carrying a small tree. Diego yawns. Javier looks like he’s planning escape routes. Henry dozes off, slumping against his shoulder. He pets the boy’s head, soothing his own nerves in the bargain, doing his best to imagine what he will say when the moment arrives. Best to say it plainly, get it out right away. The sooner it’s done, the sooner they can be on the way to Essex.

At last he’s called into another waiting room. This time a fire is already blazing, with a pair of comfortable chairs arranged around it. He stands another minute or two and is just about to give up and sit when she is ushered in by the matron. She wears a deep blue dress, almost black. Her face is hidden by a black lace mantilla. 

“Princess Mary,” he says, bowing. She gives a little shake under her lace at the sound of her old title. 

“Master Cromwell, what brings you at such an early hour?” she asks. He imagines she is stifling a yawn under there. The voice is soft, sleepy perhaps, but not gentle. 

“I have news. You must brace yourself, Your Majesty. Please sit,” he says, remembering the day in the heat when he’d fetched a chair for her. She’d appeared so pathetically grateful for the small gesture. 

She sits. He takes a deep breath. “It is your father,” he begins.

“He is dead.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I could see it on your face. I can only imagine two scenarios in which you would call me ‘Princess:’ the first is if my father had forgiven me and had sent you to call me home. I could tell by your expression that was not the case. So it must be the other.”

He stares, dumbfounded, trying to think of words of condolence. She doesn’t seem to require any. But it’s difficult to tell. 

“Now that you have told me, you are released from your duty. I trust you can show yourself out.” The voice is flat, inflexible. This is not good. She’ll be dead or in papist hands by nightfall if he doesn’t convince her otherwise.

“I’ve come to warn you, Your Majesty. They will be after you. The Boleyns will try to kill you: very soon, I should think.”

“Have they not tried to starve and humiliate me for three years?” she asks, the little voice gaining power.

“Yes, I suppose, but now they will be more energetic about it.” 

“If you were not put forward for this errand by the Concubine, then why did you come?” 

He is startled by the word “concubine.” There was a time when she was too shy to say it in front of him and called Anne “the Person” instead. Mary Tudor has grown up, it seems.

“To warn you, as I said.”

“What am I to you, Cromwell?”

“The daughter of Henry Tudor. And I serve Henry Tudor.”

“Still?”

“This is my last task.”

“And then what?

“I must leave the country. They want me dead as well.”

“But is the Concubine not your sister through marriage?”

“Through marriage. And therein lies the problem. They were never too keen on my joining their ranks.”

“I imagine not, but you have had several years to work on them. I thought you would have charmed them by now.”

“My charms are of a limited kind. I have had three years to convince you to sign the oath of loyalty and to put an end to this… situation, to come back into the light of your father’s grace--”

“I never want to hear of the light my father’s grace again.”

“No?”

“No. So then, Cromwell, am I at liberty?”

“You are. But I beg you. Use your freedom to get yourself out of the country. I have a bag full of letters at home from Grand Master De Montmorency asking when you will be allowed to make a match with the Duke of Orleans.”

“The Duke of Orleans,” she says wearily, as if she is falling over Dukes on her way to the stool in the middle of the night. “I have been engaged to him before, have I not?”

“Yes. You can finally do as your father intended. Marry into France.”

She gives what sounds almost like a snort of derision. “And my cousin, Charles, would have my hand as well, I’m told.”

“Yes,” he says reluctantly. He likes this idea less. The Spanish might come back with an army, might join with Mary’s friends and take the throne for themselves. Still, he has lately heard from De Montmorency that the French will be keeping her cousin quite busy in Italy. 

“As it happens, I do not wish to go to Spain. Nor to France.” It is the same tone of simple defiance he has heard for three years. He is getting a bit bored with the game, really.

“Then they will kill you and your blood is no longer on my conscience.”

“I think your conscience must be rather difficult to stain.”

He bows. He’s had enough. He begins calculating the distance to Essex. They could be there by early evening, if the weather holds. She leaves the room and he turns to go but finds his way blocked by a pair of halberds drawn down in front of him.

“If they want you, Cromwell,” she says, her voice comings from behind him a moment later. He turns. The mantilla is gone. She is smiling. Her eyes are clear and dry. The red hair is divided into narrow plaits that are wound around her head like a crown. Her face has filled in from the days when she subsisted on anger and pieces of fur, though the cheekbones still jut out, giving her a sharp, lean look. The face ends with a tiny pointed chin. “Then I will give you to them in exchange for my life.”

“They will never consider that a fair bargain. I am no real threat to them. I am on my way out of the country.”

“But you have the boy. Mary Boleyn’s child. My father’s bastard. He should be worth something in the bargain, I’d think. Half Tudor. Half Boleyn.”

He stares, wild-eyed at her. She wouldn’t dare. He decides to bluff. He pushes past one of the halberds as if it were a stray branch in his path. The second guard steps around and blocks his way again, and then: heavy hands on his back and arms, dragging him away.

+++

He is brought to a small cell at the base of the house. It is more of a storage room with bars on the window: not old enough to have any of the romance of a castle dungeon. There is no door mouse to whom to tell his woes, no pile of straw upon which to dissipate. Javier and Diego are thrown in, divested of some of their weapons, though he is sure the guards could not have got all the knives and wires without a strip search. Henry is last, looking shaken, but unharmed. That is all that matters. The boy looks at him, on the verge of tears. 

“It’s all right. Just a delay. She’ll see sense. I’m sure.” 

Javier and Diego look doubtful. Spanish Mary, they whisper to one another. The bastard Mary has them and will send them back to Spain, or worse.


	3. Skirmishes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An emotional reunion; Cromwell finds himself surrounded by his enemies.

**October, 1538**

The dull ache hanging over his left eye spreads across his forehead, seeping into the hollows of his skull like fog. He lies awake in the night, driving his thumbs into the tops of his eye sockets which has the effect of making the pain dissipate, at least momentarily. 

He hears a mewing and the pad of tiny paws, sees a flash of the green eyes in the moonlight. Marlinspike -- for it is he! -- hops onto his bed and marches across his body before flopping down unceremoniously on the pillow just above his head. The purring is soothing, and the vibration of the cat’s throat breaks apart the pain in his head, the way a breeze clears a mist. 

When he wakes again it is to the sound of someone coming up the attic stair. He looks around, but the cat has moved off. He sits up, as quickly as he can, groaning.

“Tom! You’re up! Good. You can help me run off some squatters in the gallery.”

“Aren’t we squatters, Lionel?” he asks quietly, not wanting to disturb his head too much.

“Us? Squatters?!” Lionel roars,a blast of sound that makes his head hurt all the way out to the roots of his hair. He doesn’t bother to argue.

“I’m not up to much. How many of them are there?”

“Only a couple, I think. But it’s the principle of the thing. If word gets out there’s easy digs in Austin Friars, we’ll be overrun.”

“Does it matter?”

“Feeling glum are we?” Lionel says, managing a tone that is genuinely sympathetic.

“A little.”

“What’s got ya down, Tom?”

“My head hurts,” he says simply. It’s all he can manage. It’s enough.

“That’ll be the spirits. Do your head every time. I have just the thing for you. I was down in the larder and found this.” He holds up a large brown wedge of something that looks like dried wood. 

He takes it from Lionel, only half interested until he sees part of a word imprinted on its side:“Reggiano.” 

“Reckon it belongs to you, you being staff and all.”

The cheese feels weighty as he turns it over in his hands. There is a touch of mold and the exterior is quite dried out, but the center is sound, no oozing or off smells. He pulls out a knife from under his makeshift mattress, hands shaking, and begins to pare away the outer skin. 

“You must try this, Lionel. It’s the king of cheese.”

“The king of cheese for the king of squatters.” 

He cuts off a fat slice, careful not to let it crumble in his hand. Lionel brings it to his mouth, about to swallow it whole.

“Now savour it. Eat it slowly.”

He puts a piece on his own tongue. The host never sat so revered in that spot. The tang puckers down to his gums, spreading into his cheeks, making his eyes water. When he can forego no longer he begins to chew, slowly at first, molars digging into the meaty cheese, feeling strength return with the scent of an Italian meadow in his nose.

“By God,” Lionel says, “that’s good cheese.”

He nods, almost overcome. There are no words.

He remembers the day when he got the cheese. He had passed through Leadenhall Market on his way home from the palace. _The four wheels of parmigiano are a gift from his friend Edward Bonner, just back from Italy, a gift that fills the entire space in the back of the wagon. He has to ride up front with the driver. They pause for a woman with a wheelbarrow full of pigs’ heads, the wheel being stuck in the mud. Someone gets down out of another wagon and helps her. A board is placed in the road to give traction to the cart, to no avail. Soon a small crowd gathers, each person with their own distinct idea about how to fix the situation. He dismisses the idea of getting involved himself, though he died a little inside to watch such inefficiency in action._

_His attention is drawn to a fracas in one of the shops bordering the market: voices raised, shouting in… Italian if he is not mistaken. He stands up in his seat to get a better look at the little shop, but all he can see is a disorganized jumble of metal goods and blown glass in the window. There are half a dozen such places in every market in London. A trim, elegant man in a magnificent great black fur cloak walks out of the shop, hat in his hand, shaking the mass of black and graying curls that spring from his head. The man looks up and spots him on the wagon and stops._

_“Thomaso? Is that you?”_

_“Master Frescobaldi? What are you doing in London? Here of all places?”_

_“I can not get what I am owed, Thomaso. I have been all over the city.”_

_“Come home with me, master. We’ll soon put you right.”_  
  
That night he’d brought Francesco home and Mary had… -- he has pushed her away so often, but just this once... He takes another piece of cheese, lets the golden crumb dissolve on his tongue, and sees her laughing at Frescobaldi’s jokes. At the time he had sat back, mildly jealous. Thinking of it now he can only remember the way the light had sparkled in her eyes, the colour of her hair in the candlelight. Above all, he remembers the way she laughed, forgetting herself, skin wrinkling around her eyes, expressing pleasure and surprise in the unladylike way her mouth hung open. Was she ever really his wife? It seems so far away now, a dream or something that had happened to someone else.

He takes another piece of cheese, washes it down with rainwater collected from the roof. _At dinner there is the smell of juniper and mushrooms, of vinegar and parmesan grated over steaming rice. They feed Frescobaldi until he complains that he will have to be rolled up to bed._

_He takes Mary’s hand as they bid their guest good night. He pulls her into an embrace as soon as Frescobaldi is out of sight. He puts his hands to her face, draws her in for a kiss. He waits for her to kiss him back, waits for her tongue to move into his mouth. It never comes. Their daughter Hope is six months old and they have not had dealings since before her birth. Mary’s body is a landscape that’s been through a disaster: the ground broken, torn and shifted out of place._

_He has his work. Brisk walks -- or walks anyway -- with Mary, steady and calm at his side as he sways in his peculiar way. He longs for one of her caprices on the lawn. He makes do when she is asleep, thinking of their times on their bench. In his memories he is rather more athletic than he probably was._

_“I like him,” she says, pulling back, squeezing his hand._

_“He likes you.” He kisses the tip of her nose, smiling to mask his disappointment. “I will have to look out for him. He’s a wily one. Always up to tricks.”_

_“Is that where you learned to be tricky?” she asks, whispering in his ear. The warmth of her breath on his neck brings another wave of hope. He can’t help himself. He thinks of the bare skin, below the edge of her shift, just out of sight, and the line between the pale flesh beneath and the tawnier skin the world can see. He grumbles that he was born tricky, kisses her again, pulling her closer yet by her shoulders. He inhales, waiting for her reply: her tongue moves eagerly into his mouth. And just like that, it’s over. Six months of waiting and diffidence and refusing her occasional offer to use her mouth because, truth is, it’s no good unless she wants him as bad as he wants her._

_“By God I’ve missed you so much,” he manages, breaking the kiss._

_“I was right here the whole time.”_

_“You know what I mean.”_

_She nods. He has planned this moment over and over in his mind. Mustn’t waste it, must not be hasty. He takes her by the hand and is leading her toward their bedroom when he hears Frescobaldi. “Thomaso! I do want to say, before I go to sleep and forget, that I am indebted to you and this kind lady, forever. If there is ever anything I can do for you--”_

_“I will be sure to let you know, Master Frescobaldi. If you’ll excuse me, I’m sure you must be tired,” he says, his voice tremulous, breaking like a teenage boy’s. He hears Mary stifle a giggle behind the palm of her hand, breaking free into a laugh as they close the door to their room. He sees her eyes wrinkle up and, for just a moment, her mouth hang open, unladylike in pleasure and surprise._

He thinks of Frescobaldi now in his gardens, elegant figure, trimmed in black fur: a blot on the green landscape. His jaw firm like a lantern, broadening into a smile as he pauses to pick a flower for the beautiful woman who is his companion: a blonde whose mouth hangs open when she is amused by her host, which is often. 

The image fades. He has lost her. There was a time when he could imagine seeing her again in the flesh, imagine the garden: the seasons would change in his mind to keep pace with the world. There would be words, explanations, a tearful embrace, followed by a great deal of kissing. One night there might be more tears than words; on another he would have more to say to her. But always the one constant was the kissing. Her mouth searching eagerly for his. He would dwell on that especially in his bed, with his own hand, alone in the dark. 

Was this what he was afraid of? Not the pain. Not the realization that he has lost her. But the fact that he doesn’t even hope to get her back anymore. He conjures her up, one last time. Imagines her standing across from him now in this attic room, just below the spot where he had once pulled a clothesline out of the plaster after an argument with her. She says his name, softly, but he turns away, pretends not to hear, fixes his gaze on Lionel who is happily eating some of the last of Edward Bonner’s parmesan. When he looks back at the spot, there is no one there. She is nothing to him. Not even a memory. He has already forgotten her again.

“You were saying, Lionel, about the squatters?”

“Only that we should clear them off.”

“Fine. Good. I feel much better now. Thank you.”

“We must arm ourselves!”

“We must!”

Lionel picks up a silver tray from the pile, puts a cooking pot on his head for a helm. He, Cromwell, picks up his wooden Excalibur and follows Lionel down the stairs.

It is quiet in the gallery, only a low cooing sound like a bird, or perhaps a girl imitating a bird. She looks up, startled: it is that girl from the window. She is sitting on the floor on a piece of the Anselma tapestry with a child at her breast.

“Is this all?” he whispers to Lionel.

Lionel shrugs. “I thought there were more. Could have sworn I’d heard voices.”

She stares at them with the same look of terror, begins trying to stand, but it is awkward with the child. 

“Miss, wait, don’t go! Do you see her, Lionel? It’s the girl from the window.”

“Of course I can see her. She’s sitting right here.”

Just then, from the far side of the room, a shout. “Clear out! You ruffians! We was here first!” She flies at him, crossing the room with uncanny speed, a heavy earthenware jug brandished over her head. She is an old woman with cracked teeth but the same bulging eyes as the girl. He looks at the toy sword in his hand, suddenly ashamed. He drops the weapon sheepishly. Lionel takes off the pot and tucks it under his arm like a cap. 

“Pardon us ma’am,” Lionel sputters, “we have been here a week in the attic. We thought you were squatters.”

“Squatters! Humph. My sister used to work here. I’m looking for her, with me daughter.”

“What is your sister’s name?”

“Amy.”

“Yes, I remember her. She was a chamber maid. Name’s Tom. I used to work in the kitchen.”

The woman smiles. She does not look so old now. Her teeth are still good up close. Perhaps it was a trick of the light.

“Sarah. That’s Margaret and little Jake.” The girl looks up, expressionless. 

“We’ve met.”

“That was you?” Sarah says. “Took me half the night to calm her down. You gave her such a fright.”

“It’s a wonder you didn’t clear off then.”

“Where to? We come to London to look for my sister, to beg for help. Margaret’s fella, well he ran off and we heard he was in London.”

Time was that he would have sat in his study listening to Sarah’s story. He would have offered them a place or money to get home. But these were different times. His headache was coming back.

“Let’s go Lionel. I need to rest some more.”

**January 26, 1536**

“Trust me. I’ll get us out of this yet,” he says, as much for his own sake as theirs. An hour goes by, Henry gives way to tears. He pets the boy’s head. “Hush now. We’ll find our way out of here. And then your mother will kill me.” Henry laughs. Diego smiles, perhaps encouraged by his levity.

“When the guard comes to feed us we could overpower him, take his weapon and escape,” he says. Javier looks doubtful, but he carries on.

“Maybe Henry can do us another of his acting jobs. Could you pretend to be sick, lad?”

The boys sprawls out, holding his stomach, groaning. “Like this?”

“Yes, excellent. You pretend to be sick, get the guard to lean over you to inspect. Then we’ll grab him. Javier and I each take an arm, Diego can take his sword.” He feels calmer having a plan, even a half-baked one predicated on the belief that a guard will actually come. He wonders -- if they were left here, abandoned -- could they escape eventually, or would they starve like Wolsey’s forgotten scholars? He pushes the image aside, trying to stem the rising tide of panic within. 

He remembers asking Thomas More in the Tower if he was afraid and More had replied, in his typical back-handed style, that of course he was afraid, he was not a strong, hearty fellow such as himself. The implication being, of course, that More -- the ascetic -- was all soul, his body a mere casing to be thrown away like one discards a used jug. And that he, Cromwell, belonged to the world and not to Heaven. More had meant to insult him, but then -- as now -- the idea of belonging to the world suits him fine. 

It was on that same visit to More that he had relayed his failure to convince the king that More was in no way complicit with the Holy Maid. He had knelt with Cranmer and Audley on the cold flagstones for an hour, beseeching. Just as it seemed the king might change his mind, the Boleyns had whisked in and, winking behind the king’s back, taken his attention elsewhere. He had not relayed this scene to Thomas More, though More did once pretend to enjoy his way of telling a story. It was too bad. It might have wound up in that play More had been writing, the one in which he, Cromwell, was but a minor villain. 

No, the noble departures must be left to saints like More. He focuses on the boy. If Mary Tudor had realized his value as a hostage, then others would as well. It had been selfishness to bring him along, of course: a wish for company, a reminder of Mary. Not that he was tempted -- he was well past the days of patronizing the likes of Mrs. T -- but he never knew what offers might come his way on the road. It was best to have a safeguard against them, and a blameless child looking back at him with his mother’s blue eyes would no doubt be more than enough to keep him faithful, as Rafe and Richard had been in their day. 

His reverie is interrupted by the distant sound of pounding hooves. Javier stands tensed at the window, holding onto the bars as if he might bend them. They hear footsteps approaching, and soon see a guard’s face at the window.

“Don’t jump me. I’m here to let you out. Jenkins sent me.”

“Why?”

“Has no one told you? We’re under attack. Lost two men already,” the guard says, swinging open the door. They stand there, staring in disbelief. 

“I thought the lady was going to bargain for us?”

“They weren’t in a bargaining mood, I guess.”

“Who is they?”

“The Boleyns and the Howards. They took out the advanced guard without warning, though they carried a white flag.” He shakes his head.

“It’s too late, I fear, to run?” 

“Aye. We’re surrounded.”

“They are my enemies as well,” he says to Javier and Diego. 

“Jenkins said you are welcome to join the fight. Figured it was better than--”

“Yes. Quite. Thank you.” He cuts the guard off, looking anxiously at Henry. They follow the guard up through the house into a tower, up and around a winding stair. Mary is on the roof with Jenkins and a few others. She wears her mother’s armour which engulfs her tiny torso. She needs a good smith if she is ever to cut a figure her grandmother would recognize.

“Cromwell, you’ve come!”

“You didn’t give me much choice, my lady.”

“Do I have your word you won’t try to escape?”

“Certainly,” he smiles, “for what it’s worth.”

“My father always said you were a man of sense and honor.” 

He fights the urge to laugh. The king said better of many a rascal. 

“What do you advise?”

“I advise you to get out of this toy castle at the first opportunity. Preferably to the nearest French frigate.”

“That is no longer an option.”

“Then put these two,” he says, pointing to Javier and Diego, “in armour, give them lances, and let them drive our attackers toward the house.”

“Toward the house?” 

“Yes, like rabbits into a net. Jenkins and I will finish them off.”

Jenkins looks doubtful.

“Have you any crossbows?” He moves to the front of the tower to get a better look at the approach, sees the glint of sunlight on armour through the trees.

“A couple. Down near the gate.”

“Get them up here. Can you shoot?”

“I’m a decent shot.”

“It’ll have to do. Just don’t hit my Spaniards. I’m very fond of them.” Javier looks away, blushing. “Don’t worry, Your Majesty,” he says, noticing that her spine positively straightens at the title, “Javier and Diego are as good as any six Englishmen in a fight.” 

“Of course, they are Spanish.” 

“You should take the boy with you, go inside where it’s safe.” 

She doesn’t move. 

“Henry, will you escort Princess Mary downstairs?”

The boy grins, steps forward, offering his bony little arm to Mary Tudor. She smiles despite herself and takes it. 

“I’m Henry. I like your armour.”

+++

It doesn’t take long for their attackers, about a dozen men, to discover that the moat is easily crossed with a willing mount. A few circle back and enter the park from the rear. Javier and Diego manage to run those left in the front systematically toward the house, where he and Jenkins can do the most damage. Javier gets one or two with his lance as well. One man is knocked down, comes at Javier on foot with his sword. Javier maneuvers away before Jenkins hits the man in the back of the neck with a bolt from his crossbow.

The guards at the rear struggle with the intruders. He scrambles to the back of the tower to see if he can be of help. He can’t get a clean shot. They are all too close together. A fire has broken out in the rear of the house and a lot of windows are broken. Perhaps Henry and Mary would be safer up with him, he thinks, just as a bolt from a crossbow bounces off a nearby bit of masonry. He ducks back out of the way. Perhaps not.

He strains to see if he can recognize any of the invaders. They all look the same in their helmets and armour. He watches in admiration as the Conversos chase down man after man. They ride so well, so flexibly, literally in rings around their foe, moving back and forth and side to side in pincer pattern. Some of the men, no doubt, have seen war, but many have not done anything beyond the odd tournament, and it shows. They ride straight in even ranks. It is easy to predict their movements and pick them off. 

With fewer than five men left, their attackers retreat.

“Run them down!” he shouts. “Don’t let them escape. They mustn’t get word back to the queen.”

Javier and Diego circle the retreating men, using their lances the way a shepherd uses a crook. They break off one from the pack as the rest escape. Diego charges toward the man left behind.

“Don’t kill him! Bring him in if you can! I want to talk to him.” 

When you are 15 and in a new country where you don’t speak the language; when you are given clean clothes and armour and your first pair of new boots; when you are handed your first crossbow, feel the weight in the stock and the power coiled when it’s ready to fire; when you stand in the ranks with the others and know something like dignity for the first time in your life; when you fire the crossbow in training and hit your target; when you get drunk with your fellows on homemade wine; when you visit your first brothel and think, prematurely, this is what it must be like to be a man; when you hear your first trumpet and stand sweating in the sun waiting for the charge; when you smell the corpses rotting in the river and tell yourself, again prematurely, this is what it is like to be at war. And when you kill for the first time, pinned desperate against the river wall with Thames mud over the tops of your bare feet; when you feel the knife slow as it enters the soft belly, when you smell the other fellow’s breath as he lets out an animal cry of pain, you start to run and you don’t stop until you come to a war. 

Afterward, you forget what it’s like, remember only a few images, impressions, sounds. But now on the roof with the weight of the crossbow and the power coiled in your hands, taking down one rider, then another, your blood quickening in your ears, you suddenly remember. You are a man -- your 15-year-old self would find you ancient -- you are twice married with more children than you can pray for in a single breath, you have some cover and competent companions, and you feel in no more danger than if you were out hawking with your fierce ladies, your Anne and your Grace. You load the bow again, putting your foot in the brace, sliding in the bolt, bringing the stock home to your shoulder, taking aim at the back of the rider’s neck where the helmet doesn’t quite meet the shoulder plate. You hear yourself cry out: _Don’t kill him. Bring him in if you can! I want to speak to him._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note about the cheese: Thomas Cromwell did receive four wheels of cheese as a gift from Edward Bonner in early 1533. In my AU I have made the date of this gift more than a year later. 
> 
> The fic will go on a short hiatus. The next chapter will be published on September 7, 2016.


	4. Allegiance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pick a side, or fate will chose it for you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Onstraysod, who has been the proverbial rock.

**October 1538**

Lately when he wakes it takes him some time to work out where he is until a smell or a sound or a feeling arrives to tell him: the smell of cooking, the sound of voices in cheerful conversation -- male and female voices -- throw him for a moment and then he smells cat piss. It is not pleasant, but it is real and it pinpoints his location more quickly than anything else could. 

His head somewhat improved, he crawls out of bed and follows his nose down the hall to the room that once belonged to the group of boys -- servants -- whom he privately called The Gigglers. He finds Lionel and Sarah trussing a pigeon while Margaret sits rocking the baby in her arms.

“He’s wide awake, Miss,” he says, smiling down at the chubby gurgling face.

“Oh he’s a happy lad.” Margaret smiles up at him, proudly.

“I’m sorry about earlier. I gave you a fright.”

“It’s all right. I understand now, you belong to the place.”

“Yes, I suppose I do. If it’s any consolation, you gave me a turn as well. I don’t like to say I swooned because that’s not quite the thing for a man of my years and station in life, but it amounts to much the same thing.”

She looks at him, puzzled, and he realizes she probably has difficulty seeing him as belonging to any station in life different from her own. At best he must look down on his luck and he is suddenly grateful that the looters have smashed or carried off all the mirrors. He was never much to look at, but he used to pride himself on being clean-shaven and neatly dressed. His ablutions were a source of amusement to Mary who just rolled out of bed looking perfect. She told him tales of King Francis’s wash room which had running water and a painting by a Florentine master, a picture of a woman with a mysterious smile who watched over Francis while he submerged himself naked in a tub. He’d been most envious of Francis’s wash room, and there was even a scheme drawn up to add one to Austin Friars, but it never got past the planning stage. There wasn’t a builder in London who knew how to run pipes through walls. The best they could manage was to encase them in wood and have cushions put on them for seats. 

“Tom,” Lionel calls, breaking his reverie, “Sarah has brought wine, would you like some?”

He accepts gratefully and she pours from the earthenware jug that she’d brandished at them as a weapon a few hours back.

“You’ve done a fine job with that bird,” he says as she fills his cup.

“Lionel tells me you’re a cook, so I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“A cook, me? No, ma’am. I worked in the kitchens.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Oh yes. Cromwell’s cook was an exalted fellow named Thurston. Upon whom the master doted and relied.”

She studies him a moment before saying, “Must have been a sad thing to see this great house broken up, the servants sent off without wages.”

“Oh it was, ma’am, a terrible thing.”

“A wonder Cromwell would let it happen.”

“Cromwell’s dead. Else he wouldn’t have let this happen,” Lionel says authoritatively.

“I heard he was living in a palace with Mary Tudor,” he says, hoping to throw them off the scent.

“No, no. Not Mary Tudor. Mary Boleyn was his wife,” Sarah corrects him. “And all the Boleyns lost their heads in the Tower.”

“Aye,” Lionel says. “Makes sense. Cromwell’s dead as well.”

He decides not to argue the point further. It doesn’t matter anyway.

Sarah rises and busies herself at the fire. “These are done, I reckon.”

Lionel fetches plates from the other room and Sarah serves the birds, along with some roasted turnips. They pass the jug around. It’s not a bad meal; it’s the best he’s had in many months.

Margaret dozes off and Sarah takes the baby, pacing round the room, patting his back.

“Whew,” she exclaims, “someone needs a change.”

“There’s a basin in my room, and a bed,” he says and she fetches a homespun bag from the floor near Margaret and follows him down the hall. He sets down his candle and fills the basin with rainwater. “Do you mind?” she asks, handing the child to him while she takes out a little sponge and cake of soap from the bag.

“Not at all,” he says, lifting the boy -- quite a solid little thing -- from her arms and placing him on the bed. “This won’t take long, lad.” Jake gurgles. He lifts the baby’s feet up and swabs his backside.

“You’ve done this before,” Sarah says, eyeing him suspiciously.

“I’m an old hand at changing. I used to change my nephew, Richard, for my sister.” This is true. It was where his career with babies began. No need to tell the rest.

She hands him a clean rag which he folds in half on the diagonal. He tucks the point up through the baby’s legs and brings the two ends together to be tied. “You never forget some things.” His hands are steady and he works without thinking.

“It’s time he was asleep,” Sarah says.

“May I?” he asks, picking the boy up from the bed. He puts the child in the crook of his arm so that his feet dangle over each side.

“That’s not how you’re supposed to carry him!” Sarah exclaims.

“He likes it. And he’s as snug as could be. He’s not going to fall.”

She looks skeptical but sits down on the bed, watching him pace the room, showing the lad around. “That’s the window,” he says, pointing the baby in that direction.

"He's too little to understand that," she says.

“Maybe so, but he seems happy to hear it. Don’t you? Yes you do!” he sings to Jake.

The house is quiet save for the noise of the floorboards squeaking beneath his feet. Sarah leans back in the bed, making herself comfortable. Jake’s eyes slowly drift shut, his breathing evening out. He, Cromwell, creeps around to the side of the bed and places the sleeping baby next to Sarah, then walks around to the other side and sits with his feet on the floor. He should go through and find Lionel, but he likes the sound of the infant dozing. He’ll go through in a minute.

Lately he dreams dreams of the attic room and a series of shapes burned into the walls. The shapes threaten to form letters or the outlines of animals before they fall from the walls and litter the floor like broken glass, like leaves from a hideous tree. The shapes are always red, outlined in black, and they seem familiar but he can’t quite place them. He is awake now, watching Sarah and the baby sleeping in the guttering candlelight, but if he closes his eyes he can see the shapes.

Lately his real life has taken on a dream-like quality. He can’t explain seeing Sarah as an old woman, a hag with broken teeth, when in truth -- looking at her unlined face in the candlelight -- she is probably no older than his Mary. Perhaps he is under some kind of spell, some trick perpetrated by his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Howard, with her leech books and her poultices of onion. Can she curse him all the way from Hunsford House? That drafty barn she inhabits with her grand-daughter, and namesake: Anne’s red-headed Princess. And now they have the niece as well, Mary Howard, since little Richmond died. They were all sad to hear of it. Though some blamed witchcraft in that case as well.

One thought strings into another, the candle burns itself out. His head slumps against the wall.

He feels a tension in his jaw, realizes that there is food in his mouth. This is strange but not unwelcome: it’s the familiar flavor of Parmesan, that tang that almost permeates muscle and bone, a taste that has the power to conjure up his wife, so far away across the sea. But is she far away? He hears a sound of the country in deepest July: crickets chirping. The air feels warm and he remembers their bedroom in summer, windows flung open to the garden, the smell of herbs floating up like on the night Frescobaldi came to stay with them, the night of the four cheeses. It is silly to credit the cheese, of course. Yet no sillier than to blame the birth for their troubles. After her confinement she became a terror at chess, destroying all comers, every move intended to draw blood. She said she no longer held back for the sake of men’s feelings. She had earned the right to coolness, he supposed. But it dawned on him, somewhere in month four, that this was a test. It wasn’t about the birth or her body or his tiredness. It was about whether or not he would let her step away. 

He sees her now, sitting on the end of the bed taking off her shoe, not knowing whether this is a dream or a memory.

“Shall I send for Adelle?” he asks, wanting to give her a chance to send him away. Praying she won’t.

“Mmmm, no,” she says, biting her lip thoughtfully. Finished with the shoes, she begins on her stockings, lifting her skirt, unpinning them from her garters. He watches, undressing himself as quickly as is seemly, kicking his shoes into a corner, tossing his cloak and doublet across a chair.

“Are you nervous?” she asks.

“No,” he lies. “How about you?”

“Terrified.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Test me, “ she says, holding up her hands.

“Like ice. That’s not like you.”

“Fear.”

“Stand up,” he says gently and she complies. He walks around to her back and begins to undo the laces of her kirtle. It’s been many months since he’s done this for her. Since she’s let him.

“What’s happened to us, Thomas?” she asks.

“Just a dry season, love. I’ve been busy. You’ve had a rough time with Hope.”

“I don’t mean just that. We used to talk about traveling. The Holy Land, remember? Or Egypt?”

“We’ll get there one day.”

“Sometimes it seems like Calais was yesterday. Other times it seems so long ago it’s like it’s something that happened to other people.”

“We’re still those people. In essentials.”

She laughs, a short chuckle. “You were always big on essentials.”

“Well they are...essential.”

“Do you miss those desperate people we were in Calais?”

“Sometimes, yes. But you leave behind the panic and the uncertainty and you gain stability and contentment. I can live with the tradeoffs.”

“But the excitement!”

“I’m feeling pretty excited now,” he says, breathing into her ear. She turns around and touches his face.

He unpins her sleeves, unties the little bows that secure them to the bodice, places them on the chair with his doublet. His movements are slow, deliberate, none of the mad scramble of earlier times. The bodice drops like a big piece of bark from a tree. He kneels to pick it up, but is suddenly moved by the sight of her knees bare in front of him in the candlelight. He reaches over and squeezes one. She gasps a little and takes a step toward him, bringing her legs apart. He take hold of each, pulling himself up a bit like a man climbing. His mouth connects with the soft flesh on the backs of her legs. She groans as he moves upward, kissing here and there on her thighs until his head is up under her shirt. He is trapped there with the warmth and smell of her, now impossibly hard, his cock jutting up, raising his own shirt like a little tent in his lap. Still he climbs upward, slowly, until at last his mouth reaches her cunt. Another groan and she leans back against the bedpost and raises up one leg to rest it on the bed, opening herself up to him. She lifts her shirt up to give him some air and, he thinks with excitement, to get a good look at what he’s doing. The smell, the taste of her, goes into his jaw like the tang of the cheese. It is like nothing else, though; incomparable. He moves his tongue across the button of flesh at her center and she reaches down and grabs him by the hairs at the base of his neck, pulling him up into her further. He can feel her tensing, can hear the oaths, and he knows she is close. He waits, kneeling, patient, as she grinds her hips into his face. His thumbs draw her aside further and he pushes in as far as he can with his tongue and then she is laughing and hauling him up to his feet by his hair. She falls back on the bed and he leans forward and takes both her legs and drags her forward until her backside is almost off the bed; she whoops a little and laughs.

The image fades. Where is he? He breathes in: he can no longer smell the summer herbs. He takes a deep breath, searching for cat piss, but instead finds the sweet smell of wood smoke clinging to woman’s hair. He hears breathing in the dark, feels the warmth of a body next to him. He reaches his hand out tentatively, feeling a warm, soft, rounded form beneath it. She is rolling over toward him, reaching for him, petting his hair. He kisses her: she taste of wine. His hand at her breast meets with some resistance, a rough linen bodice, a working woman’s dress. He wonders if she’s been at Adelle’s clothes again and, with the wood smoke smell and the dress, he thinks it must be Twelfth Night. Her hands are on him, eager, fumbling. He kisses her deeply; she breaks the kiss, laughing, a low smoky laugh. Her hand is on his cock, stripping back the foreskin with violence, and it’s then that he realizes something is wrong: the hand is too large and calloused, strong but clumsy. And there is a moment when he lies there, letting it happen, trying to will the dream back to life. It feels good enough, he thinks. And it’s been so long. But it is no use, the dream -- and it was a dream -- has faded.

“Sarah, love, I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

“You’re just shy. It’s all right. I’ve got it all in hand.”

“I, I know,” he says, gently removing her hand from his cock. “It’s not that. I’m married. I should have told you.”

Just then, Jake starts crying. She sits up, takes the baby in her arms to comfort him.

“I knew you was too good with babies.”

“I’m sorry. I fell asleep and dreamed. I was just… confused. I’m sorry,” he says again weakly.

“You took me for your wife, Mary Boleyn.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Well, I started to suspect when you said the cook was -- what was it you called him?”

“Exalted.”

“Exalted. No kitchen hand talks like that. And then when I said the Boleyns all lost their heads in the Tower you went all funny for a second.”

“So you know who I am.”

“Yes. I reckon I should be flattered. Mary Boleyn is said to be a great beauty.”

“She is.”

“She’s not dead then?”

“No. She lives. She is safe… abroad.”

“Then why lie here with me, pretending? Why not go to her?”

“She won’t want me anymore.”

“How do you know?”

“Something terrible happened. I lost her son.”

“Lost?”

“Everyone thinks he’s dead but I still have hope.”

“What are you doing here with the likes of us?”

“I’m trying to get some money together to look for him. If I can publish a pamphlet, it would have greater reach than I could do on foot.”

“Why pretend to be someone you’re not?”

“I still have a lot of enemies about. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“No, Tom. Now why don’t you go back to sleep. It’s time I took Margaret away to bed.” She gets up with effort, groaning a bit, then bends over and takes Jake, making her way down the hall slowly in the dark, hushing the baby as she goes.

He wants to tell her not to go away to stay. But it's for the best he supposes. He lies there in the dark, listening to Jake's cry grow fainter, until he can hear nothing at all. 

**January 26, 1536**

He follows Jenkins down out of the tower, through the burning house. They bend low and bring their sleeves up to cover their faces, moving through the choking black smoke until they reach the first bare waiting room where he’d sat not six hours earlier waiting for his audience with Mary Tudor.

They’ve brought the captured soldier -- one of Howard’s -- around back. Diego and Javier stand by warily on their mounts while Mary’s guards take turns punching and shoving their prisoner. Jenkins steps in, shouting for them to leave the man be and taking the fellow’s helmet off. He is young, about Gregory’s age, with an Adam’s apple that bobs up and down as he swallows, looking from the face of one guard to another. A new pair of boots stick out from under the gleaming armour.

He, Cromwell, walks over to where Jenkins is standing with the prisoner.

“Do you know my face, boy?”

The prisoner shakes his head quickly.

“Where are you from?”

“Brundall, sir, in Norfolk.”

“Don’t sir me. I’m not one of those. Master will do. I know Brundall,” he lies. “Good tavern there.”

“Yes, si-Master, the best.” The lad manages a shaky smile.

“That’s Master Cromwell,” he says, watching the boy’s expression. The eyes widen slightly, then dart away for a moment. “You know the name?”

“Ye--Yes. You are one of the men we were looking for.”

“Looking? Just looking?”

“Looking to kill. Lord Howard’s order.”

So much for hospitality, he thinks. “Thank you for your honesty, lad.” It’s too bad they can’t take him with them, he might come in handy as a hostage. But it’s too difficult to move quickly and keep an eye on him at the same time. He might give them away. And, anyway, Mary Tudor might consider him as _her_ prisoner. He looks around, sees her standing near a wagon, watching over her ladies as they load up her possessions. Henry is there with her, leaning in to her side, with his arm still linked through hers.

“Cromwell!” she calls, spotting him. He walks over in no hurry, looking about the courtyard as he moves.

“Yes, my lady?”

“You have fought well. You are free to go if you wish.”

“And the boy?” he says. Henry looks up, curious.

“He belongs with you.” He reaches out and takes Henry by the hand, guiding him to stand next to him.

“That is very generous of you.” There is not a trace of irony in his voice. He bows, thinking she has no one to sell them to at the moment and she doesn’t want to waste manpower keeping them in line. “Where will you go, my lady?”

“Jenkins has a cousin at Hertford Castle. We will go there.”

And no doubt wait for Sir Nicholas Carew and his Catholic friends. “Why not come with us?”

“The ports will surely be sealed by now.”

“I have no need of a port. Get me to a coast and I’ll find us a ship.”

“To France?”

“To France, and then wherever you like.”

She hesitates for a moment. “I’ll take my chances at Hertford.”

“Then we must part. Good luck, Your Majesty.” As he is walking away he notices that Diego has gotten down off his horse and is standing near Javier, who is slumped in his saddle. There is blood on Diego’s hands and face. He rushes up, taking Javier’s arm, helping him off his mount.

“He can not ride, Master.”

“I can see that. Dear God, poor man.” They set Javier down gently on the ground. Diego kneels over him and forces back the armour to reveal a wound in Javier’s side about six inches long.

“I’m sorry, Master,” Javier says, squinting through the pain.

One of Mary’s ladies brings a shirt which he tears into strips.

“Here, roll this up for bandages,” he says, handing a length to Henry. The boy looks stricken and terrified.

“Help me get his armour off,” he says to Diego.

Mary notices the commotion and comes over.

“Change of plans, Your Majesty.”

“There’s room in the wagon for our hero,” she says, leaning down, catching Javier’s eye.

She seems unfazed by the blood but notices Henry’s distress. She leads the boy away and turns his attention to the baggage, asking him if any of his things were left inside. A burning building, a wounded man, a prisoner. She takes it all in stride and keeps going, directing her ladies to arrange the last of the baggage around Javier. He wonders when, if ever, she will feel the loss of her father. He could ask the same of himself.

That afternoon he sends Diego away on another desperate ride across country. “Stick to the back roads, man. I’m afraid I haven’t much money to give you. You can only ride as fast as one horse will carry you. Get this message to Master Sadler: send my sons to Hertford Castle. Bring horses. Bring arms.”

*******

He and Henry set themselves up in the only vacant place they can find in Hertford Castle: the blacksmith’s shop. There is a room behind the forge with a couple of beds and a washstand. It is all he needs and he is happy enough there, though the familiarity of the place sometimes makes him dream of Walter. No one seems to know what happened to the blacksmith.

A week passes: they hold their breath, waiting for some sort of attack or resistance which never comes. Jenkins has patrols out looking for soldiers heading their way, but so far there is no word. He, Cromwell, fills the time with provisioning the castle for a siege. The locals comply with little encouragement. Anne is not liked in Hertfordshire; they see Mary as their own since she has lived there for some time. And there is a rumour, which comes through the taverns and up into the tower of the great castle: Anne has lost another son. There is to be no little prince to anoint Anne’s New England. God has spoken again, His voice echoing through empty wombs, and in reply cows, chickens, bushels of grain are brought into the castle on credit. He even finds a carpenter to repair the old siege machine. Jenkins’s cousin checks with him to ask when his men can expect to be paid. This is a tricky question since Mary has no real wealth of her own apart from a few furs and baubles. But Mary’s friends are on their way and they will have money, or so he tells Jenkins’s cousin. He plans to be long gone before Nicholas Carew and his lot of Papists arrive.

Javier’s wound heals, but there is a setback: a fever. They are in despair for a few hours but the young man’s strength wins out. He is sitting up, lucid though not ready to ride. A few more days, perhaps. The rumour is that Nicholas Carew is within a day’s ride, and so is Anne’s army, lead by George Boleyn. They joke about looking forward to getting a shot at George. He thinks of his Mary, thinks of Henry. They should be going while they can.

As he is leaving Javier’s sick room, Mary Tudor arrives. He wonders for a moment if she has fallen under Javier’s spell like so many of the serving girls at Austin Friars, But no, she sees visiting the sick and unfortunate as part of her regal duties in her little pretend realm of Hertford Castle.

“If I might have a word with you, Cromwell, before I see your friend.”

“Of course, Your Majesty,” he says, drawing her aside into a window alcove outside the Infirmary.

“I want to talk to you about your quarters. I hear you have moved into the blacksmith’s shop. Do you think that’s appropriate?”

He shakes his head, confused, “I would think, given my background, it would be considered just the thing.”

“I was thinking of Henry. It is not a fit place for my brother, even my half-brother." He keeps back a smile. It is sweet, really. She is trying. 

"He will not want to move away from me and sleep on his own." 

"No. I was thinking you both could take the room adjacent to mine.”

He studies her. She can’t really be in earnest. She must be joking, but there is no smirk about the lips, no tell-tale darting of the eyes.

“Now I am the one who must say that’s not appropriate.”

“Why ever not? It’s the best in the castle, apart from mine.”

“I’m sure it is, my lady, but--” He can’t quite believe he needs to explain this, but she has lived a very sheltered sort of life. “Your room can not be adjacent to mine, it would be scandalous for me to have such, er, access to you.”

“I am told that you had access to my father, the king, in such a manner, via a connecting balcony. And if you are to advise me--”

“Pardon me, Your Majesty, but who said I was to advise you?”

“Well, have you not been advising me since Hunsdon House? Just yesterday you settled a matter with Jenkins’s cousin upon which I was most anxious.”

“I was keeping myself busy. As soon as Javier is ready to ride, I shall be going, I assure you.”

“If you can do so much, merely to keep yourself from being idle, then I’d be a fool to let you go.”

He is suddenly afraid that she will throw him in the dungeon to keep him close.

“You flatter me. But I will not be safe here. Many of your friends are my enemies.”

“Then I will protect you from them, just as my father protected you from your enemies within his court.”

“Even so, there is the matter of my family. They have been sent abroad and I long to join them. I will not be happy until we are all reunited.”

“That is very admirable, I’m sure. You are a well known family man,” she says coldly. “You thought nothing of separating me from my mother for years.”

He sighs. She will not guilt him into this. She will not threaten him into this. There is only one way and she sees it, seizes on it at once: “Cromwell, please. Do this for my father’s memory. Do this for England. If the Concubine rules, God knows what will happen to this kingdom.”

He laughs. “The Concubine has ruled for some time and England is still here. I believe you can prevail without me.”

“No, I cannot. I put on a brave face, but you know perfectly well that will only take me so far. You have run wars. You have practically run the country for years. Everyone knows it. My father did nothing without you. You handled everything, just as Wolsey did before you.”

Damn you, he thinks. Damn you for that. His head should not be turned by it, he knows, he should not be flattered. All those years in Henry’s service, and the king could never quite bring himself to say the things she’s said so easily. She has learned from her mother, to entreat with white silk roses. He turns to go. She steps in front of him with her small body. He nearly collides with her.

“Consider if the ports are sealed. You must rely on finding a ship elsewhere.”

“What of it? I am well equipped to do so. Friends in low places, you know.”

“I’m sure you have. But even you, Thomas Cromwell, must get to the water before you can cross it. And you are known here now. You are the talk of the neighborhood: Cromwell has changed sides, he is helping Princess Mary.”

“How do you know?”

“I have my spies.”

“You will have me caught out, is that it?”

“No, I will not. I am merely pointing out the reality.” He looks down at her, trying to reconcile her with the girl she was, the one who stammered and nearly fainted, who looked so pathetically grateful when he fetched her a chair. She does not step aside, but her eyes soften, slightly. Perhaps she is thinking of that day in the heat when her mother was certain he didn’t understand Catalan.

“All right, I’ll stay. Don’t make me regret it.” It is likely that Javier will not be able to ride before Anne’s army arrives. It is better for her to think she has convinced him than for her to realize he has no choice.

“If we prevail, consider all that you will gain.” He can hear her mother’s voice in the words, appealing to his baser instincts. “Let that opportunity be your incentive.”

“Keeping my head attached to my body is enough incentive for now,” he says with a smile. She is about to leave when he stops her. “One thing: If I agree, you must let me stay in the forge.”

“I really must insist. If you are to advise me, I need to have access to you at any time.”

He shakes his head. “You do not understand. It is because I am a man. A married man, yes. An old man, to be sure, but still a man.”

Her eyes widen, and then she looks affronted by the implication. “Yes, I suppose you are right. Keep your forge, your quirks. I will simply have to travel farther to speak to you.”

He thinks of her father, dragging him out of his bed at all hours: that first time when he sent Brereton and his people thought he was being arrested.

“You can always send for me, Your Majesty. I will come any time, day or night.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note about the diapering: look you can't prove that there weren't diapers of some sort in the Renaissance. Yes, we have paintings of very young children urinating in public places and yes, we do know that some reports of the Palace of Versailles imply that the whole world was once vast toilet, but this I think is over-simplification. I've done due diligence into the topic of the potty habits of Henry's court and my conscience is as spotless as little Jake's bum.


	5. Correspondence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cromwell picks up his pen and finds some of his old strength return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Onstraysod for all her help and encouragement.

**October, 1538**

The streets of London have never been easy for walkers. Perhaps there was some time in the Roman past when it was a pleasant village with wide, dry lanes, but even then the chariots must have pushed you into the side streets that run at odd angles and dead end suddenly in private yards and gardens. As much as he dares, he braves the main streets, dodging wagons and horses. Still, he travels nimbly the crisscross of lanes that empties into Leadenhall. He remembers the little shop: the over-priced trinkets jumbled in the window, Frescobaldi’s face as he walked out into the street with only his hat in his hand. 

On country lanes he doesn’t mind his worn cloak, his face grown shaggy, returning to nature, but in London he can feel eyes on him. He catches a glimpse of his graying beard in a shop window--a desperate character! Hands that don’t stand out as particularly dirty in Hampshire or Wiltshire seem filthy as he lays out his treasure on the counter. He hides his left hand, with its stained and reeking bandage, as quickly as he can. The shopkeeper takes no notice, seeing only the plates and goblets--and, in particular, a silver knife with a glass gem in the handle. It is just as well that the man doesn’t know him: it wasn’t too long ago that he’d threatened him with legal action if he didn’t repay what he’d owed Frescobaldi.

He comes away from the shop with nine shillings, a tiny pot of ink -- the smallest and cheapest to to be had -- and the flag which he’d used to bundle everything together. He reckons he needs five shillings to publish his pamphlet. He heads in the direction of the printer’s, passing the narrow bottle neck of the quays at Billingsgate where he smells sea pie in the air. He finds a woman with a cart and buys a pie, eating it on a bale of rope, watching a pair of gulls argue over a bit of bone he throws in the road. As the warmth spreads through his belly and into his limbs, his mind catches on an image of her, her hair bound up in a linen rag, flour on her hands and face, and though it racks him, he lets the thought linger. He imagines himself now, sitting at his own pauper’s meal, fighting for a seat in these lean times, envying his old self for his young wife. He should be proud that he ever had her at all, that she ever lived with him a day, let alone… It should be enough to carry him through this time, whatever it is, but it is not. The sea pie sticks in his throat. He gives the last few bites of it to the gulls, wishing he’d never met her. 

He needs a place to sit and work and figures a public house, the Feathers, will do. The barmaid looks disapprovingly as he orders a half pint and occupies a small table near the window where the light is good. She hands him his beer and his change as if he were contagious. He uncorks his ink -- foul-smelling stuff -- and spreads out his paper. The scrap was scavenged from his old desk at Austin Friars and the back side contains a draft of his will. _I, Thomas Cromwell, gentleman, being whole of body and of perfect memory...to my good son Gregory I bequeath six hundred, three score and six pounds and my yellow quilt of Turkish satin, all titles and lands…_ He draws lines through Gregory’s houses, through Mary’s annuity, and his daughters’ dowries. He stops at little Henry’s portion and sighs. Was this really ever a will for a sane man? What delusions had he fed on? As if the king would go on living forever, handing out titles and land. If he were to write the document today, what would he have to give anyone? _To my wife, Mary, I bequeath my love, as leaking and useless as an old boot; to my sons, the burden of my care, and the care of their siblings…_

One phrase alone escapes his black line: _And when so ever I shall depart this present life, I bequeath my body to be buried where it shall please God to ordain me to die._

No use relying on your wits on Judgement Day. God will simply steal them when the time comes. And now he has the account to pay, and nine shillings to his name. On one side of the balance sheet are his sins: he has murdered, he has committed adultery; he filled the king’s boxes with gold from the monasteries; he has had men put to death. And on the other, a few good works, already forgotten. The others are of questionable merit: would history thank him or curse him for saving the life of Mary Tudor?

He drains his watery little pint, makes no motion for another and turns the paper over. Writing with one hand, blotting with the other, the old rhythm returns. A putrid black blob of ink is added to the sins of his bandage. He keeps going, working quickly: _to the people hereabouts I do right heartily implore you be on the lookout for a young gentleman…_

**+++**

The printer is an old acquaintance, a former Friar Observant who was brought up on charges of forgery when he worked for the Cardinal. The father has the good grace to pretend not to recognize him and leaves him waiting in the front of the shop for a long time. The walls are hung with some of the printer’s most popular wares: a picture of Olympias and Jupiter in which the Macedonian queen’s legs are spread in anticipation and she is twisted -- uncomfortably, he thinks, poor woman -- toward the viewer so that he can, presumably, see both breasts at once. Jupiter kneels between her thighs, all beard and muscle and, jutting out from his lap -- which thereafter turns into a serpent’s tail, twisting round in curlicues -- is his cock, taut and ready for action. The cuckolded King Philip looks on in horror: Jupiter has sent his eagles to blind him too late. He shudders at the sort of man who would buy such a thing and hang it under a tapestry in the bed chamber, taking a quick peek to stir the blood before the lady wife comes to bed. Jupiter was forever turning into one thing or another, swans and bulls and serpents. Do so many women walk about thinking of nothing but lying with beasts? It seems to him unlikely. 

The printer returns, taking the pamphlet, promising 200 copies for six shillings. delivery to the usual public houses and inns-- all the work to be completed this week. On his way out he, Cromwell, stops in a side room where two lads are roasting chestnuts on the hob. He offers them six pence to be paid when they bring him a copy of the pamphlet when it is printed.

“Where should we find you?”

He thinks a moment: with the remainder of his fortune he could find a decent room for a few weeks, eat properly, get back in health to continue his search. “Ask for me at Austin Friars. An old fellow named Lionel will know where to find me. The name is Tom Smith.”

**+++**

He finds Lionel standing outside the old Friary where a few local girls ply their trade near the shelter of the bell tower.

“The friars have a new batch,” Lionel says, holding out a tin cup. 

He leans in and takes a sniff: lethal. “How much?”

“Tuppence.”

He fishes in his pocket for some coins. “Ask them how much for a pint of the stuff.”

“A pint? That will cost you more than just money. Your head will likely never afford it, Tom, take it from me.”

“Nonsense. Did I ever tell you that I learned to drink with Germans?”

“You did, Tom, yes you did at that. Well, it’s your funeral,” he says with a shrug and heads off to inquire about a pint. 

They settle on benches around a fire, sipping from tin cups with a little pail of the fiery whiskey between them. One of the girls walks over, gives Lionel a wink and asks, “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Tom,” Lionel says.

“Just Tom, then?” the girl asks.

“Tom Smith,” he says. 

“Pour us a drink then, Tom Smith.” She holds out her cup which he fills near the top.

Lionel raises an eyebrow at him. 

“What?” 

“I thought this was a private celebration.”

“It is. Just me, my friend Lionel, and… what’s your name, miss?”

“Eliza.”

“Eliza,” he says, drawing out the _lie_ in the word. “Short for Elizabeth. My favorite name.”

“I thought your favorite name was ‘Sarah,’” Lionel says archly. 

“That was last night.”

“Well, she has better teeth than Sarah, I’ll give you that,” Lionel whispers.

“What, pray tell, was wrong with Sarah’s teeth?!” he booms.

“Nothing. Nothing. I’m sure they were as straight and as white as snow when they were in her head.”

He drinks deeply, confused and shaken as Eliza laughs a trilling little laugh that sends a shiver down his spine.

“What’s that?” she asks, pointing to the flag tucked into his belt.

“Oh this? The flag of our nation, dear Eliza,” he says, shaking it out to its full size and glory.

“He’s been using it as a blanket,” Lionel explains.

“It’s big enough. Give it ‘ere,” she says and he passes the flag to her. She puts it over her shoulder like a cloak. “Smells a bit… whiffy.” She wrinkles up her nose.

“Sorry.” Damned Marlinspike.

“‘S’alright. I don’t mind. It’s lovely material, this. As soft as anything. I wouldn’t mind having a dress made out of this, or a shirt.” She throws a corner over his shoulder and brings him closer to her on the bench. Lionel scoots the other way, looking wounded. Probably grieved over his lost share of the drink. Eliza is putting it away fast. She’s nearly finished her tin cup. 

**January 28, 1536**

Anne's army will be soon upon them. They are nearly ready. He finishes a final victualing list, gets it ready to send to the town. He's put it off as long as he can. If he is going to write to his wife, it's now or, perhaps, never. He smooths a fresh piece of paper across the table, it stares up at him blankly, waiting. How like flesh the paper is to the eye and yet it is a dead thing, cold and flat beneath his hand. 

_To my well beloved wife Mary,_ he begins. It's what he used to write to Liz.

 _I commend unto you these words,_ \--a bit formal, but he carries on, -- _written in haste I am afraid, but of my heart._ \--A bit better. And now to the point.-- _We are well and safe here in Hertford Castle under the protection of the Princess Mary (lately restyled by her friends, among whom I count myself and your Henry). It is with great and thankful pleasure that we have joined the company here as protection from the dreadful attacks of our enemies. I am employed as a smith, sharpening tools and swords. I help with victualing and advising when I may. Henry is my right hearty assistant and I have found him to be so useful that I am daily glad of his presence. (I have enclosed a note from him as he wanted to prove that he keeps to his Latin by sending you a few lines)_

_On the dreadful day my Spaniards reached me on the road south from Norwich and told me the grievous news of His Majesty’s untimely death, my first thought was not to alarm poor dear Henry, and so as soon as we had made ourselves hidden by virtue of an obscure road with which I was made acquainted, I broke the news to him as gently as you could wish. Perhaps one day he may know what a great man his father was._ Laying it on a bit thick, perhaps, but you never know who is reading. 

_I took as my final duty to the king the matter of warning Princess Mary -- his pearl, as he so often called her -- about the danger from her enemies. While at Hunsford, the house came under attack. The Spaniards acquitted themselves so bravely that it was only a little work to dispatch the attackers from the battlements. Sadly, Javier was injured, but he is on the mend and will be ready to ride soon._

_During the fray, I am not certain wherefore, the house caught fire. By good fortune, the Princess had friends at Hertford and so we rode here. We are well supplied and can withstand a siege of many weeks, I believe. So far none have come to oppose us, though daily new friends and allies seek the amity to be found within these solid Norman walls. I must hurry and send this letter before it is too late._

_I hope that you and our daughters are at liberty and ease with our friends. Such news I pray you send me as soon as may be._

_Your loving husband,  
Thomas Cromwell_

He puts the pen down, picks up his cipher book and carries on, writing in the code almost as quickly as without. He trusts that she brought her cipher book with her. Surely, Rafe would not have let her leave without it. 

_You will no doubt wonder that I took refuge where I have and why I did not make straight for the nearest coast. I believed that my enemies would be looking for me on any port road I might choose and that no one could imagine that I would head for Hunsdon House. From the first to the last, I sought only to warn Mary and then make my way by some irregular route to the water and find a ship. I found recompense for my deed in the form of a short stay in the dungeon. One of Mary’s men, a sensible man called Jenkins, only let us out when our mutual enemies were upon us. After the fighting Mary was content to let us go, but as we were preparing to leave we discovered that Javier was grievous hurt. I could not leave him with Spanish Mary, as he calls her. You know how he and his cousin fear anyone connected with his native land who might discover their recent conversion to the Christian faith. It seemed a cruel thing to leave him to die or to shift as best he could with Mary’s lot. Jenkins arranged for Javier to recover at Hertford Castle and we naturally followed, in hopes that he might be fit to ride before Mary’s friends arrived. He came down with fever and it was more than a week before he could hope to sit on a horse. During that time, Sir Nicholas Carew, the Seymours, and the Poles arrived. One thing I can say for them: they have come on quick to the study of war and will be able to hold this place well, and to triumph on the field should it come to that._

He stops, reads over the lines. There is so much he wants to tell her now that he has begun. But best keep to the facts. There will be room for sentiment at the end. 

_A word about this group of Mary’s friends. You have heard me speak in the past about the Papists and how they would surely put my head on a spike if they could. And that is true, though I think Mary will protect me as best she can. The Poles in particular have not forgotten the high hand I was forced to take with them in regards to the Holy Maid. I have taken precautions for myself and Henry and have hired a woman and her son from Hertford as my private cook and food taster. My money grows short, but this is a necessary expense, I’m afraid._

_My darling, I wish you had this day seen your son with Lady Mary. He has grown very close to her and I believe she dotes on him and considers him her true kin. If we succeed -- and I must pray that we will, committed as I now am -- I believe she will do much for him. I think they are united in missing their mothers. If she feels the loss of her father, she will never show it to the world. Little Henry, for his part, seemed confused when I told him and was more grieved about missing the voyage to Italy with his sisters than he was about his father’s death._

_Every day I expect an attack on the castle and every day I climb the battlements to watch for my sons. I hope they come soon. We need them and I fear for them in London because of their connection to me. Rafe will shut up the house and disperse the servants. He has business enough of his own to keep going without me. It is a sad thought to think of the place empty, to think of the kitchens and the bedrooms bare and echoing. However, I must keep to the task at hand in the hope that we may soon return to that place to be together._

He closes his eyes. Pictures her face and writes as much as the cipher will allow, as if he's speaking to her:

_I miss the girls so. Kiss them all for me. My darling, I long for you and I beg you, send unto me in your own hand whatever you will. Even if just to chide me for my blunders, please write, oh Mary, please write. I go to sleep every night in my little bed behind the forge with your name on my lips and your image in my mind.  
-Thomas_

**+++**

On a rainy day, two months later, in the middle of the siege, a parcel comes to him at the forge. He thinks it is his food smuggled in from the town through a tunnel. He calls for his cook but she says, no Master Cromwell, it is a letter. 

_February 10, 1536_

_To my loving husband,_

_Your letter finds us well and I send this reply with the bearer. We are safe with our friends and, indeed, we are at ease and pleasure here, save for the thought of you so far away and in danger. I pray that the Virgin will protect my son and husband in their cause, which is just and right. I also pray that Princess Mary will succeed, though she is set against my kin. Her Highness is set so deep in displeasure with me, and my lord father and brother think me so wicked, that I fear I will never be able to return until they are set down back to Kent. I pray for the Spaniards as well and thank the Lord that they were with you to protect you. Above all, I ask God to speed your sons to you. Though it is but a small part to play, I am on my knees every day on your behalf._

_Our host wishes you well and our daughters send their love. He dotes on us all and I feel I’ve come home almost to family. He takes such pains to make us comfortable, with no formality but rather that easy manner of his._ \--He could do with less of Frescobaldi's easy manner, by God!-- _Catherine and Jane are teaching Hope to dance so when we are all together again they can take turns dancing with their father. Jane misses Gregory terribly and cries over him. She has included a few lines for him in a note. Catherine helped her with her writing. She makes her letters very straight and clear._

_You did right to tell Henry about his father in the way you did. I agree, he will one day know more of that man’s greatness. Until then, I ask that you stand in his stead and look after him and keep him safe for me._

_-your wife, Mary_

He feels a coldness in these last lines. What a strange thing it is to write of a grief one does not feel. If she were here, they could hold one another and between them find some feeling for the man, but as it is, their grief is all bound up with this calamity and there is no way to feel anything but self-pity. 

The rest in is in cipher, he takes a scrap of paper and his cipher book and, heart racing, begins to work it out. Here is where she will tell me she loves me and misses me. That she does not blame me. That her head is not turned by her host's and his blasted easy manner.

 _Thomas, how strange it is that you should choose sides against my family, and yet I felt somehow when I learned of the king’s death that something like this would happen. I had the strangest feeling the whole day and when Rafe came from the palace with the news, it was like the world dropped away and I was left standing on a tiny island that was once the land._

He finishes deciphering, the words float into shape with ease. She has ciphered perfectly. He feels a ridiculous joy at this unexpected talent. He has never had a cipher from her, their letters tending toward the prosaic: a few lines to remind him to bring a present for the girls or to forward an important document or letter.

_Rafe was as cool and smart as you could wish and he set me to work sewing my jewelry into my cloak. He arranged our passage and rushed us to the docks to sail with one of the last ships that day. Adelle and Christophe have come with me. I hope you are not angry about my taking your beloved Christophe but he cried so at the idea of leaving her. And I thought you would want a manservant to protect your women folk on the long voyage. I could think of none closer to your heart than he._

He can almost hear the merry tone of her voice when she writes about Christophe. Well, he is glad for the boy. He will surely take to Italy. He has the talent for it and he will find the language not so different from French.

_Oh Thomas, you bade me chide you and I can not help but wish you would have made straight for a port and come here with my son. But since I can not change it, I will ask God to bring you both to me quickly._

_I fear I will never be allowed to return to England. You are very important, I’m sure, to Princess Mary, but I hope she may spare you to come to visit your wife some day. Before then, as soon as you can, you must send Henry to me. You could send him with Javier or Diego and then the journey would be nothing to him. He would enjoy it. I ask this as a mother’s right. I do not care what Mary promises to do for him. I want him with me at all costs. You must promise me this._

_And that is all the chiding I have in me. I chafe to write so much in cipher and all the while the messenger sitting in the garden with his feet up on Frescobaldi’s table. I must save my strength to pray for you again and again until God sees fit to send you to me._  
_-Mary_

He scans back over the last lines, frowning at the desperation in her pleas for him to send the boy with one of the Spaniards. She must know it is impossible, poor darling.

It is a good letter. Better than he could have done in the circumstances. The image of the messenger with his feet on the table is particularly to be admired, and yet...why does she not give him those reassurances he so longed for? This may be their last communication and no avowal of love! No forgiveness for his folly! He reads back over it, prying apart the sentences in his mind, trying to get at some sense of her feelings. Perhaps in her joke about Mary sparing him to visit her? Yes, he can see the smile on her face. Imagine the playful look in her eye. That is what he will keep with him. He folds the letter carefully, tucks the scrap of deciphered words, carefully inside as he would do with any official document, and places the lot under his pillow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About the alias Tom Smith: Walter Cromwell sometimes used the alias "Walter Smith" when appearing before the magistrate in Putney. Because of this, it is believed that a certain Tom Smith who appears in the record as buying land nearby, might be our Crom. There is little evidence for this theory, but I like it anyway.
> 
> In several places I have quoted Cromwell's actual will and borrowed phrases from a variety of his letters.


	6. The Prodigal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The parable of The Prodigal Son is sometimes known as the Lovesick Father.

**November, 1538**  
They drink the last of the Friars’ aquavitae. The drink is strange, it has crept across the border and burned the crops in the fields. It wears a kilt. It is a shoeless invader that puts its muddy feet on the table. 

Eliza left when the drink ran out. He will remember her as a trilling laugh and the feeling, like a dare, like the moment before the die is cast. Her hard, narrow body with the high, small breasts, needing only a head of red curls to be that of Mary Tudor. Perhaps that’s why, but there’s no knowing now. She’s gone. She took his money and bought him more drink, and when Lionel came to cluck his bare gums at them, she chased him away with her hideous laugh. When the printer’s apprentices came to say that his pamphlet was delivered and to collect their six-pence, she told them--it was left to her, since he was passed out, insensible--that there was no money left. The boys kicked him while he was asleep and, when he came to, his ribs were askew, his right eye swollen shut, and she was gone. Eliza was gone. 

Lionel came back once to confirm that, indeed, the money had run out. And with that, the King of the Squatters left again, promising to look for food. It’s been days. It doesn’t look like Lionel will be back. Meanwhile, he lies in bed staring up at the ruined plaster where once, long ago, he pulled the clothes line down in a fit of rage. 

Marlinspike comes and goes and --bless him--sits on his head.

He finds that he can’t move his hand, probably the effect of the putrid ink, soaked into his bandage. He is poisoned and the swollen hand looks like that of a crab, with his stiffened fingers as pincers. 

He would invite aquavitae in to murder him, if it would agree to be lured back. _Don’t you want to wear my shrunken skull at your waist? You are too ugly,_ the drink says. _You are too ugly even for that._

+++

It is late one day, almost dusk, when the men come. He takes them for soldiers when he hears the soles of their boots on the attic stairs. They call out, “Thomas Cromwell, we come for you.”

Instinct sits at the base of his skull and rides him with a dull panic and dread. He stands as best he can, pulling himself up with his one good hand, scuttling into a dark corner, hiding behind the door. 

“I heard something. Did you hear something?”

“Probably more tramps. Or pigeons.”

“Filthy things. I hate them.”

“Which?”

“Both.”

“Shhhh, quiet. I heard it again, it’s coming from in here.” The door creaks open slowly; the light from the hallway illuminates his make-shift bed. 

One of the men walks over and bends down, touching the bed. “Still warm. There’s someone about, anyway.”

“Whew. What a smell.”

“Cat piss.”

“Jesus.”

They turn to move out the door, to investigate another room, when the light falls across his face. 

“Jesus!”

He hears a voice, it must be his: “I HELD A SNAKE IN ITALY!”

“He’s mad. Poor sod.” They take a step back and he makes for the door and runs, half stumbling down the stairs, his hand screaming, his brains leaking out his head, entrails in a knot. He hasn’t moved in days and now is hurtling downward, down, down the narrow wooden servant’s stair, and across the hall. He hears the men behind him crashing like they are taking the place apart with their feet. A few more steps and he’s out into the blind glare of the courtyard. Instinct moves from the base of his skull up to the top of his head, a raking slash of white pain. He puts his hands to his eyes too late. They have him now anyway, one at each elbow, dragging him off his feet. His heels send up a spray of gravel.

He looks up at a window, the little flat where the Williamses live, and sees her: Johanne, looking back concerned, compassionate, but frightened too. 

“Johanne!” he cries.

She comes forward, puts her palm to the pane of glass.

“Master Cromwell.” A voice comes gently. “It’s me, Rafe. Don’t you know me, sir?”

“I do lad. I do,” he says without looking at him. He recognizes the voice and he can’t bear to open his eyes.

“Won’t you come with us, sir?” Rafe asks, hauling him forward. “That’s it, lean on me, sir. You’re ill. You’ve had an injury.” They ease him into the wagon. He lies back on a pile of burlap bags. Rafe sits next to him, holds his head on, keeping his brains from falling out into the wagon. “Not long. Not far. You remember. Only around the corner. Helen will be so glad I’ve found you. She worries. You know how women are. Ah, you see, here already, sir. Easy there, watch your step. Peter, Joe, help me with him. Peter, run fetch the doctor, tell him to come at once, Master Cromwell is ill. He has an injury.”

Joe helps him down the steps of Rafe’s house and into the laundry. The steam, the smell of soap, always pleasant to him, helps him relax. He slumps against Joe, watching the laundresses go about their work. One looks up from her ironing. A figure moves through the room, a light step, a lady’s gown, hair pulled back and tied with a linen strip. It’s Helen Stadler, Rafe’s wife.

“No, no, you’ll iron in wrinkles. You need a light hand, move the shirt continuously with the other. Firm, short strokes. Tease them out a little at a time.”

She demonstrates, moving deftly, belying her origins. She was a laundress at Austin Friars before she married Rafe.

“When will my wife act the part and stay out of this confounded place,” Rafe says, coming in down the stairs, laughing.

“When my shirts don’t come back creased.”

Rafe leans in and hugs her, kissing the top of her head, muttering low so he, Cromwell, can’t hear.

“I found him at Austin Friars.”

“Thank goodness. Is the doctor sent for? Look at the state of him.”

“Already done. He is worse this time.”

They don’t know how the ear sharpens in the dim, with eyes swollen shut for days, every sound clarified to reveal its origin and purpose. He had been mistaken about Joe and Peter. They weren’t soldiers, but they wear the same kind of boots in the army. Rafe probably got a deal or they went missing from a supply wagon when no one was looking.

Helen comes forward. “Master Cromwell. Welcome home.” She takes his arm as if he’s a little late for dinner. Her hand is warm, gentle. She smells of starch and soap. She and Peter take him upstairs slowly. He must stop to rest along the way, but eventually they arrive at a small, cozy room. There’s no fire in the grate, but so much heat radiating from the walls--they must be over the kitchens--that the room feels close after his unheated attic. He sits down stiffly. Helen leaves and he hears her outside, talking to the doctor. “He is worse. He hardly knows where he is. He has a terrible rotten hand. The smell.” 

Helen sends someone through with soap, sponges, and a basin to clean the wound. Pain is all there is for the next few minutes. And then warmth and a clean, dry bed. Then some small food: bread in milk, and sleep.

**February,1536**

Mary Tudor sits on a make-shift throne: the grandest chair to be found, an old gnarled thing, black with age. They say two of Arthur’s knights were held prisoner here, in the dungeons, and that accounts for the labyrinth of tunnels running back and forth from the town to the castle. Perhaps the first owner was a keeper of the Grail, or perhaps he was simply an amorous Duke who liked to go a-visiting. At any rate, the chair is at least as old as the Grail. 

Mary has exchanged the black mantilla for her old gabled hood. It’s too bad, the mantilla lent her an air of mystery. They have banked the fires up for her and it’s hotter than his forge. He stands sweating, waiting for her answer. 

Tom Seymour clears his throat. She looks at him blandly and he smiles. “I believe we should ride out, Princess Mary. We cannot stay to see what guns they bring from London.”

“I know what you think. What your family thinks. Though your sister Jane baffles me, I confess.” Mary looks at him. “What do you think, Master Cromwell?”

“I think, Your Majesty, that these are still solid walls and we are safer behind them than without.”

“You can’t hope to hold out in siege,” Henry Courtenay says.

“Not indefinitely, no. But that was never an option. I remind you that we are not in France. England has no guns of her own. We must buy them, which means that we must deal with the Flemish, as the Turks are out of the question for obvious reasons. You cannot find a gun anywhere in this country to take down these walls.”

“There are guns in the north and on ships.”

“Anne will not dare to pull our defenses from the border or to leave the ships unarmed. She fears the Scots and the Emperor more than Princess Mary.”

“What about the Tower. Is it not well defended with guns?” Mary asks.

“Small guns, yes. Usually loaded with grape--a kind of shot that’s good for killing people, but useless for bringing down walls. There are a few old bombards in the Tower from the last war. Without shot. They take stone balls. It takes weeks to quarry the stone and carve the balls to fit the gun precisely. And even then, it would take half the mules in England to bring them here.

“Now is not the time, Master Cromwell, for one of your eternal lectures about how England is fifty years behind France in gunnery. And sixty years behind Italy in fortifications,” Charles Brandon says.

“Be glad that they were ever unheeded,” he says, looking away in disgust, eying a cool window seat. He is hot and tired and would like to sit down. “The truth is, Your Majesty, that there is much we can do to improve our lot here. But we must act quickly. We can shore up the outer walls, make them wide enough to put what small guns we have where they may do some good.”

“This can be done in time, in your opinion?”

“Yes. I think we have to try. As I said, it would be weeks before Anne can mount an effective siege.”

“What if Anne has new guns poured in place? That’s what we did in France,” Brandon says.

“Poured in place by whom? As I said in my eternal lectures, England has no one to do this. The pourings that Henry commissioned were only preliminary. We aren’t there yet. She would need to get someone from Antwerp, from Brussels. That is territory held by the Emperor. I hardly think Anne can look to Mary’s own cousin for help.”

“No, but she may look to Francis. He has men in his employ who could do this thing,” Courtenay says.

“Oh Francis likes Anne well enough. But he has no incentive to help her. At least not yet.”

“You think Francis wants to wait us out, see who will come up with the throne?” Mary asks.

“Wouldn’t you? Why go in, get involved? Wait for us to take each other apart, then step in and marry the victor to his son,” he says and studies Mary’s face, flushed purple at the idea of marrying the Duke of Orléans. He can’t tell whether it’s rage or embarrassment. Probably the former. “That’s what Montmorency is telling him to do,” he adds.

“Does he always listen to Montmorency?” Mary asks.

“He’d be a fool not to.”

“He only says that because Montmorency beat him at chess,” Tom Seymour chimes in.

“There are worse recommendations for a man,” he says and spins on his heel, stalking across the room. He sits down heavily in the window seat. They all look at him, stunned by his rudeness, then to Mary as if the very least that will happen is that he’ll be clapped in irons and dragged down to the dungeons.

“Master Cromwell, are you ill?” she says gently, offering an out.

“Perhaps a little. It’s quite warm in here, don’t you think?”

Charles Brandon, whose square face is as red as the cross of Saint George, nods in agreement.

“Let’s get on with it!” Edward Seymour whines.

“We have decided that the fortifications of the castle should be seen to,” Reginald Pole says. He’s been taking notes at a table in the corner.

“Sod the fortifications!” Edward Seymour shouts, as if they are being rude in turns. They all turn and look at Seymour. 

“Sir Edward, may I remind you, you are not at an ale house.” Mary glares out from under her hood. “Watch your tongue.”

Seymour begins bowing immediately, begging pardon.

“I take it, Sir Edward, that you do not support fortifying the castle?” she asks.

“I do not. We should ride out, gather an army behind us. Your allies will come to your side. They only need to see you.”

“Perhaps we can do both,” he, Cromwell, says, crossing his legs in front of him, luxuriating in his seat. Seymour looks at him poisonously. You can almost hear the schoolboy whine, _Why does Cromwell get to sit when no one else does?_

“How so?” Seymour asks impatiently.

“We use diplomacy. We send out an official emissary, someone to ride north and find out who our friends are.”

The others look at one another. No one wants to volunteer for this.

“Why not go yourself then?” Edward Seymour says.

“No, we can not send Cromwell,” Pole says. They all turn to look at him. It is the first time he’s offered an opinion. “He is the most hated person in the north of England, after Anne herself, owing to his participation in the destruction of the monastic houses of that place.” Mary looks glowingly at her champion, the Vicar of Piddletown, a scrawny scholar, all beard. He, Cromwell, takes advantage of the fact that no one is watching and rolls his eyes. 

“We can send Father Pole, then,” he says, leaning back on his elbow in delight, taking in the view: Reginald Pole, a descendent of Richard the Lionheart, sweating profusely at the idea of a dangerous diplomatic mission.

“I- I- think my talents are best put to use here. I flatter myself that Your Majesty has placed her spiritual guidance in my hands.”

He must bite his lip to keep from laughing out loud. There are limits to what he can get away with. “Why not send the Sirs, Thomas and Edward. They are so keen to ride out.”

“An excellent plan,” Tom Seymour says while his brother gives him a brutal punch in the arm. 

“It’s too bad they have young Norfolk on their side,” Henry Courtenay says. “And Harry Percy. The northern lords respect the old titles.” Charles Brandon looks at Courtenay, sourly. Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, never forgave his cousin the King for elevating Brandon above him. It’s an old rivalry. One that inspires a yawn. Honestly, his seat is so cool and comfortable he could almost nap. They are no closer to choosing an emissary, or indeed deciding on whether one should be sent at all. He has no permission to begin reinforcing the walls, which he plans to begin organizing as soon as the meeting breaks up. 

+++

Word comes to him in the forge that he is wanted at St. Nicholas’s Church. He makes his way down into the tunnels, through the dungeons, nodding to the guards keeping watch on the stores. He comes around the corner, scaring up a rat. They could do with some more cats. He thinks of Marlinspike with a smile. Perhaps he’ll suggest to the church that they take in strays from the town. He holds his lantern high, moving through the damp chill of the tunnels. The door to the church is marked with a fish. He knocks and waits and knocks again. Eventually a boy answers. It is late, they are singing vespers. He’s interrupted their singing. He tells the lad to fetch Father when he can and sits in the back row of pews, listening to the music. The church is empty except for a few men--wool traders by the look of them--farther forward in the pews. 

St. Nicholas’s has a fresco painting that covers the wall: Mary Magdelene in the garden. Ancient figures, faded, soft with age, look out in the candlelight. He is glad, for now, that this one hasn’t been painted over as many others have. The old stories, the saints, seem friendly to him in the dim room. He is comfortable with ghosts after all. He imagines Mary sitting next to him or perhaps lighting a candle as the sounds of the Magnificat fill the church. He can almost feel his family around him, feel their presence. The Father comes out of his sacristy behind the altar and approaches the wool traders, dipping low to whisper to them. They nod and stand and, at that moment, the candlelight falls on their faces and he knows them. He lets out a little gasp and rocks forward as if struck from behind. He flies to his feet.

“My boys!” he cries in the loudest whisper he dares. Gregory and Richard move to embrace him and, as he buries his face in his son’s collar, the tears welling in his eyes are let loose and flow freely. Mary, he thinks, has been lighting candles and saying her prayers. Good woman. God bless her, good woman.

“Wait until you see what we’ve brought you, sir,” Gregory says with a mischievous smile. He follows them outside to a wagon parked near the entrance. Gregory climbs up, pushes packs of wool aside to reveal several large wooden chests emblazoned with his livery. 

“Is this what I think it is?”

“Yes, and bolts and powder too in case there are guns.”

“Keep your voice down, lad,” he says, grinning. “It might be the first time that a box of crossbows crossed the threshhold of St. Nicolas’s. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.” 

+++

“It is a fine, suit, sir. I wish I’d had a chance to wear it in the tournament,” Gregory says as Henry pulls the last buckle tight. 

“There now, can you move about?” Richard asks and Gregory does a little dance.

“It’s heavier now.”

“That’ll be the mail,” he says, leaning against a counter. Refitting jousting armour with mail shirts and gussets is all that’s left to them. “I’m not sorry you didn’t get to ride in the tournament. I’m only sad about the reason.”

“And what reason was that?” a female voice says from the doorway. Mary Tudor stands in her own armour, looking curiously at Gregory. Henry looks up and smiles, skipping to her side and taking her arm through his. 

“Your father’s untimely death, my lady. Gregory was supposed to ride that day.”

“In celebration of his marriage to the...person,” she says, glancing at Henry. Her implication, he supposes, is that it was God’s outrage at the King’s wedding anniversary that led to his fall. He would argue the point with her but he would prefer to spare the boy, and so perhaps would she.

“I believe you’ve met my boys, my nephew Richard and my son, Gregory.”

“Yes, Gregory I remember in particular. He sat with me at Hunsford when I was at my lowest.”

“It was my pleasure,” Gregory says, meeting her eye, ears turning pink.

“Master Cromwell has become an old hand at refitting armour. My mother’s, you see,” she says, running her hand down the skirt of her breast plate.

“I mangled a piece of fine Catalan art to make it work for the time being.”

“It fits now and has been reinforced. That’s all that matters. What matter if your rivets are ugly?”

“Who says my rivets are ugly?” he says, slightly offended.

“Tom Seymour for one.”

“I’d like to see him do better.”

“Tom Seymour never made a rivet in his life,” she says, laughing.

“Nor anything else, I’d wager,” Richard says. Mary purses her lips, looks slightly displeased. 

“I came to ask you, Cromwell, why there are men using a battering ram to knock apart my castle walls?”

They’re your walls now? he thinks. Well, they may be soon enough. “They aren’t knocking apart the walls. Only removing the merlons. On my orders.”

“And who gave you leave to remove my, what did you call them? Merlons?”

“Yes, those charming remnants of the dark ages. Have you ever seen a merlon struck by a gun?”

“No.”

“It comes apart, in shards, as fast and as deadly as any shot. And what’s more, they prevent the guns from having free movement. Leave us open to blind spots.”

“Enough. I concede to your greater knowledge of merlons. But as I said, you had no permission to begin this work.”

“I assumed there was a tacit agreement at the end of the meeting.”

“I’m sure Father Pole’s record would disagree.”

“Perhaps. Anyway, what harm does it do? The battering ram was lying around useless. The men were idle: throwing dice and wenching. Might as well put them to work.”

“In future, I’d like to be consulted.”

He bows. “As you wish, Your Majesty.” She turns to leave, snapping her fingers for the guards who trail her like devoted hounds to follow. 

“What do you think of her, lads?”

“She’s different than I remember. More grown up,” Gregory says.

“Less stubborn, I think,” Richard says. “She changed her mind. That’s a good sign.”

“But she got the last word in I noticed,” Gregory grins.

“Yes. Like her father.”

“She likes Henry. That shows good taste,” Gregory says. 

“Last time you met her, son, I think you said she was ‘sneery’.”

“She doesn’t seem sneery at all.”

“Perhaps she’s found you improved as well. Less inspiring of sneers.”

Gregory blushes and Richard laughs. 

“Were the men really dicing and wenching?” Richard asks.

“Some. A few. I suppose. Aren’t men always dicing and wenching? It’s hardly a lie. An exaggeration perhaps. The princess is very keen to protect our souls.”

“Better to see to the walls first,” Richard says.

“I couldn’t agree more.”


	7. Transubstantiation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "To doubt the miracle is not the same as doubting the power of the story. The symbol has as much weight as the thing it symbolizes."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as ever, to Onstraysod for all her help and support.

**November 1538**

The dwale sleep is long and full of conversation. He hears Helen in the laundry talking about him as if he were an old shift, stained beyond saving. He hears Rafe in the study, paying the doctor and wondering aloud if it’s worth a shilling a day to keep the mad man insensible with draughts when they might have the same effect from a bottle of strong wine. He hears the Queen at York Place, converting Gregory back to the true religion: his son is deep in Novena, while one hand remains deep in her shirt. Over their heads is a spot of new paint, where the falcon has been replaced with a rose and arrows. He hears the sheep on Wellham Green, pruning the grass that grows on the long grave; he hears the worms plying the soil around him, while insects nibble his flesh. He is at last where he belongs: with the dead, muted and viscous with decay. 

He wakes, finding himself leeched, and the doctor asleep in a chair nearby. He pushes the blood suckers free with his good hand, watches them fall to the floor boards and writhe in the dust. His bad hand looks human again, an effect of the lancing which, now he remembers, was why the dwale was administered. The barber did the work, of course, paid out of the doctor’s shilling. Could he get the barber back? It has been nine months since his hair was cut. And his hands are not steady enough to shave.

He pulls himself up stiffly in the bed and, looking down, realizes he is wearing a different shirt. His good hand is clean, even the ink stain has faded. He must have been bathed as well. There are footsteps outside the door and the doctor snaps to with a cough and a self-conscious chuckle. The door opens and Johane Williamson walks in with a tray. 

“Your breakfast, doctor,” she whispers and then, noticing him: “Your patient is awake, I see.” 

“Nothing wrong with my hearing,” he says, looking at her with a half smile. The doctor tucks into his breakfast, drinks the small beer noisily. So much for professional oaths. Not that he wants to be bled further. But he might at least check his pulse or inspect the whites of his eyes. 

“Oh dear, Doctor, your leeches have gone astray,” Johane says. The man leaps to his feet with a mouth still full of ham and begins to crawl around on the floor, grumbling incoherently. Johane stifles a laugh with her hand. 

“Sorry about that. I was quite out of my wits,” he, Cromwell, says with a wink to Johane.

“I’ll need to fetch some more,” the doctor says, standing and looking accusingly at him. “Master Stadler will be charged for this, you understand,” he adds, picking up the empty jar and shaking the murky water to see if perhaps there isn’t a spare aboard after all. With a sigh, he pushes his breakfast aside and passes out the doorway. Johane breaks into a laugh as soon as the door is shut behind him. 

“A ridiculous man,” he says.

“And you are a terrible patient. Pulling off bandages, murdering leeches.”

He folds his hands in his lap as if to make up for their earlier misbehavior. She takes the tray from the foot of the bed and sets it aside on the doctor’s seat.

“You hungry?”

“Starving.”

“A good sign. I’ll send for something,” she says, walking to the door. 

“No more bread and milk, please. Can I have some meat and ale?”

“Wait until the doctor gets back.” She turns away from the door with a contemplative frown. 

“The man’s an idiot.”

“He saved your life.”

“No, I don’t think it was he.” She avoids his pointed gaze by fussing with the doctor’s instruments, tidying things that don’t want tidying. “Does John Williamson know you’re here?”

“We are in need of money. Rafe is paying me.”

“You are in need of money? After that settlement?”

“Oh that settlement has been nothing but trouble for John Williamson: foolish investments, half-baked schemes, gambling.”

“Sounds like me.”

“The difference is you could always afford to lose. Even now, I have no doubt you’ll get back on your feet.” 

She leans in and begins fluffing the pillows behind him. She smells clean, like soap. He studies her as she works: the same black dress, expertly mended to make do. Would it have killed Williamson to buy her some new clothes? Though perhaps she keeps this one for work. The cloth is a good, sturdy weave.

“I’m glad someone still thinks so,” he says, glancing up. She steps away, looking at her hands like she doesn’t know quite what to do with them.

“How is Mercy?” he asks, hoping to fill the silence.

“Much the same as ever. Colds in the summer. Fevers in winter. But she hangs on bravely.”

“It must be practically a holiday to come here.”

“It was when you were asleep. Apart from the noises.”

“What sort of noises?”

“Like someone dying or--”

“It was probably the draughts.”

“Yes, the doctor said they would make you restless.”

“Before that fool gets back with his leeches, will you promise me something?”

“What?”

“Will you get the barber back here? I really want to be rid of this beard.”

She smiles. “I was just getting used to it. And besides, it makes your face fuller. You’ve lost a lot of weight, you know.”

“You’ve noticed.”

“It’s hard not to. I can count your ribs.”

“Is that what you did while I was at your mercy? Count my ribs?”

“Don’t be silly. And anyway, it’s not as if there’s anything I haven’t seen before,” she says and then looks as if she instantly regrets it. 

“I’m glad it was you. When I woke up. Was it you that told Rafe where I was?”

“You won’t be angry with me?”

“I won’t.”

“I had to,” she says and steps away to adjust the curtains. “I couldn't just stand back and watch you destroy yourself, Thomas.”

“It was a rather public unravelling.” He thinks of what Alice More said to him. _Once you’ve had dealings with a man, you can’t help but worry whether or not he’s cold._

She keeps her back to him. Not seeing her face makes him bold. “Johane, do you think I’m mad?”

“No. Not really. But you should stay away from strong drink.”

“Is that why you won’t call for ale?”

“This isn’t a public house.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’ve worked too hard to put you back together to watch you fall apart again. As long as I still have some say about it, no, I won’t call for some ale.”

“I’m sorry, Johanne,” he says at length, still thinking of Alice More.

“Sorry for what?”

“I should have written to you, from Calais. I should have told you I was getting married. I should have tried to break it gently. I should have--”

“Thomas, that was five years ago,” she says with a worried look.

“But I’ve never apologized.”

“We’ve never spoken.”

“We haven’t, have we? Odd. It was only that I thought we had an understanding.”

“We did... We do.”

“Sit down, here. On the bed.”

She eyes him warily and then perches on the edge of the bed, out of reach.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m not up to anything. I only want to look at you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It comforts me.” She still reminds him of Liz, he supposes. The old wound, well scarred over by now.

She turns toward him. “Did you ever think, Thomas, when you were working for the king’s divorce, working to change the laws, that someday you might free me with one of your decrees?”

“It was always there, on the edge of things. The unlooked for effect. The Johane Williamsons of this world might be free from the John Williamsons.”

“I knew that. Knew it deep down. That’s why I stayed even after we...ended things. It’s why I worked at the head of your little army. Why I came back after the humiliation.” She is crying now. He reaches out for her, but she scoots further away. “Why did you stop? Fighting, I mean. Why did you walk away?”

“I’m not sure. I got lost, I think. Looking for the boy.”

“Rafe says he’s dead.”

“I know. What do you think?”

“I think it would take a miracle and I don’t believe in them anymore.”

“Neither do I. Will you come closer?”

She edges an inch closer, still out of arm’s reach.

“You don’t trust me.”

“You mistake me for someone else. You always have. Shouldn’t you be thinking of your wife?”

“I’m always thinking of my wife. My wives. Both of them are with me. Always.”

“The dwale has not yet worn off,” she says, rising from the bed, stepping away.

“I am more sober than I’ve been in months.”

“I don’t doubt it,” she says, shaking her head.

They hear the doctor’s tread in the hallway outside. “Bring me meat and ale, woman!” he whispers as loud as he dares, and then -- as an after-thought -- “Please.” 

The doctor comes in with a full jar of leeches, looking pleased with himself. He, Cromwell, groans and lies back on the pillow. After the leeches, after the doctor has gone home for another breakfast, a servant boy brings the tray: bread and cheese and a small cup of beer, heavily watered down. Like what a child would take. He smiles as he takes a bite of cheese and a sip of beer. It is the best food he can remember. 

+++

**April 1536**

The art of the smith is in the tongs and not the hammer: the myriad adjustments required to put the object in place for the blow. Walter wasn’t an artist but he took pride in his work: a straight edge, a sturdy nail, a strong weld. He finds himself guided by Walter in memory and sometimes feels the old man’s spirit in the forge. He hears the gruff voice in the brief silence between hammer blows. When he stops and listens, as he does now, he hears only the throaty roar of the flames.

It is late, Henry has been in bed an hour at least, when the messenger arrives. Mary Tudor has sent one of her guards for him. He stops his work and begs a moment to secure the furnace, dowsing the flames with the damper. He pulls off his apron and sweaty shirt, leaving them to dry on a peg in the forge, and walks back through to his room for a clean shirt. Henry stirs a little, rolling over, shedding his covers. He pulls the blanket up over the boy’s shoulder. He grabs a cloak to throw over his shirt and arranges himself as he follows Mary’s “hound” to its mistress. 

They walk down stairs deep in the heart of the castle. The siege is quiet at night. He has placed men or boys at points through the tunnel system with horns to listen for mining. So far they’ve yielded nothing, but the Boleyns will fall back to the pick and shovel in time as their small guns make no progress on the walls. The infirmary is busy treating wounds with seething oil, but his meager updates to the walls were enough to mean that the casualties on the other side are far greater. 

They arrive not to the usual state rooms but to the ancient chapel. The chamber is tiny, the black beams hang so low that the guard must duck going in. Mary Tudor kneels at the altar. She must know he’s there, but for now the only noise in the room is the faint clack of her beads on the railing. There are no windows, and candlelight has been kinder to these paintings than those at St. Nicholas. The figures are still sharp with lurid color and the Virgin, already sublime in her halo, looks away as her son is slaughtered, his blood splashing into the cup.

He waits for Mary to finish her prayers, taking in the damp smell of earth, like a tomb. At last she stands and turns to face him. She is dressed for bed, a cloak thrown over her nightgown, hair a glowing auburn in the candlelight, falling in loose curls around her shoulders.

“They say this chapel held the Grail,” she says. “That the knights built the castle around it.”

“It is a good story. One can believe it, looking around.”

“For my part I think that’s just what it is, a story.”

“Your father believed it. Arthur, the Grail. Those things held power for him.”

“And you, Cromwell?“

“I think stories are important. Some people say the Bible Readers don’t believe in the Eucharist. That is a common slander. To doubt the miracle is not the same as doubting the power of the story. The symbol has as much weight as the thing it symbolizes.”

She nods, considering. She takes a step forward and lowers her voice as if in the confessional. “When I was little I wanted to rebel against my mother, but I did not dare do so openly. Once in church, I took the host and kept it on my tongue. I did not swallow. Later, in my closet, I spat it out. It was only bread.”

“Father Pole would say that it is the devil that makes the bread and wine appear as only bread and wine though they are really flesh and blood. He would say that your wicked doubt caused the miracle to fail.”

“And what would you say?”

“I would say that the sin, if there was one, was in wanting to rebel against your mother.”

She says with a frown, “You were always tireless on the subject of obedience to one’s parents. I wonder if you were so loyal to yours?”

“No doubt they would say, as most parents do, that I did not heed that particular commandment as I ought.”

“And what,” she asks, taking a step closer to him, “does your wife believe? I hear she is of the true faith.”

He is thrown by the question but tries not to show it in his face. “I have never discussed the finer points of transubstantiation with my wife.”

“I am intrigued by her. She holds the true faith, yet her people are heretics. I hear from everyone about me that you are a heretic as well. How can two such divergent souls come together as one?“

“In the usual way, Your Majesty,” he says, studying her. She does not look like she knows what he means. “Only perhaps with a little more indulgence on her part.” 

“Does she not fear for your soul?”

He smiles, thinking that once Steven Vaughn asked him the same of his Mary. 

“She tells me in her letters that she prays for my soul constantly. And my person as well,” he says, pulling his cloak tighter around his shoulders, wishing he would have taken the time to dress properly. 

“It is damp in here. You’ll catch a chill.” She steps forward and takes hold of the strings of his shirt and, drawing them together, ties them into a bow. Her tiny, cool fingers brush his bare neck, raising gooseflesh. He fights an urge to take her hands in his own and warm them. 

“I am at a loss, Your Majesty, as to why you have called me here at this hour.”

“How well do you know your sister-in-law, Lady Rochford?”

“Not well at all,” he says hesitantly, trying to puzzle through her question. “She does not approve of me.”

“That is nothing. I do not approve of you and yet here we are.”

“Lady Rochford does not care for my company, nor that of my wife. I have little occasion to speak to her.”

“Then I wonder why she writes to you.” She reaches into her sleeve, pulling out a minutely folded note. He takes it and spreads it out: the seal is broken, though it is addressed to “Master Cromwell.” He scans the contents and then hands it back to her.

“Probably a trap,” he says.

“That is what Father Pole thought.”

“Nice to see that I was the third person to see that which was addressed to me.”

“Fourth. Sir Edward has read it as well, I’m afraid.” 

He shakes his head. “It is too bad. She would be a formidable ally. It would be no small thing to have her father, Lord Morley, on our side. He is no soldier, of course, a man of letters. And while we have plenty of those, his nearness to the Boleyns would show their base cracking apart.”

“Whoever did write this has a hatred of Lord Rochford.”

“That is a point rather in favor than against. With the possible exception of myself, I believe there is no one in England who hates George Boleyn more than his own wife.”

“This family secret to which she alludes. Do you know what this is?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me. Bear in mind that I’m not asking you to tell me. I’m ordering you.”

He studies her. It may well be the dungeon before the day is done. So be it. He has almost expected it.

“It is my wife’s confidence I would break. I will not say.”

“I demand to know.”

“Princess Mary, I would not tell your father and he threatened me with the Tower.”

“This secret could well mean my life. All our lives. Don’t you see, any wedge to use against them must be tried?”

“I am aware. If I were free to speak, I would have used it long ago.”

“Does it have to do with the duel you fought with Lord Rochford?”

“Yes. And that is all I will tell you. I will not break confidence with my wife.”

“Then you will spend the night in the dungeon.”

“What good will it do? A night, a week, a year. It would not matter. And you need me more than you need this secret. Trust me.”

She will relent now. He sees it on her face. The softening.

“Your son, Gregory, he is a handsome lad,” she says, looking up with a half smile.

“So they say.”

“You don’t see it?”

“I suppose. Why?” he asks, annoyed.

“He is very obliging in his manner to me. Perhaps he will give me what I want.”

“He knows nothing of the Boleyn family secret.”

“That is not what I mean.”

“What is it you want from us?”

She takes a final step toward him and he finds he can back away no further. He is up against the door. She takes his hands and holds them to her flushed cheek, kissing his fingers. It is such a strange, desperate little display. He watches fascinated, even horrified for a moment. This is how you love when you have nothing but instinct to guide you. He tries to stay calm, to imagine that this is happening to someone else. The touch of her lips is real enough. The Seymours, the Poles, would kill him. The guard could come back any moment. That old rush, like his first days with Mary; those nights when Johane would slip into his bed: he feels his cock stiffen. Her breath comes faster, warming his fingers. No one needs to know. She could be his for now in this place, for this time. They could all die tomorrow anyway. She rubs her thumb across his monstrous knuckle. “Such hands you have. Gnarled and strong. I confess I have imagined them inside me.” With that, something in him turns to the Virgin in her halo, an absurd and silent plea for her intervention.

He pries his hands free of her as gently and as firmly as he can. There is no nice way to do this. 

“Princess, you are still rebelling against your mother. That is all this is.” He steps away, tries to calm his breathing, slow his heart. “You toy with me. You play at being queen. You throw me in the dungeon. You let me out one day to watch me play soldier or blacksmith. And now lover. That is all this is to you, a game. Now, have me taken away to the dungeon, or let me go to my own bed.”

She looks stunned for a moment, and then angry. He is afraid that she might kick or bite him; or worse, that she will find that voice of hers again and use it to call her guards. “Good night, Master Cromwell,” she says at last. 

He turns to leave, steps through the door into the passage before he realizes he has no lamp. He returns a few moments later, begging a candle from the alter. She hands it to him wordlessly, looking at him miserable and ashamed. That is the worst of it. That look. Like the moment after a knee-trembler. But they didn't even get the knee-trembler. He takes a step forward, placing a comforting--he’s aiming for fatherly--hand on her arm.. 

“I am sorry. I was rude. I thought if I was nice it would make things worse.” 

“I think you should go,” she says, something of her old voice returning, “before I change my mind and call my guards.” 

He wonders, as he walks back through the cold, dark passages to the forge, why she chose him of all people? Perhaps it is because she knew he would not act on her advances, when any given Seymour -- or even that bloodless Reggie Pole -- would certainly have obliged. It is a child’s game. She is daring to spit out the host. But only in the privacy of her closet. 

Henry wakes when he comes in. 

“Thomas, you look like the devil himself,” the boy says. It’s his latest joke to call him by his Christian name, to put on speaking like a man. Last week it was repeating the Spanish epithets he learned from Javier. 

“Go back to sleep. I’m only tired.” He snuffs out his candle and lies down on his little bed, listening as the boy’s breathing evens out into sleep. 

He shifts uncomfortably on the tiny cot. He is bone weary but still stirred up, in his thoughts if not his body. If it were otherwise he could just take himself in hand, get it over with. He shudders, realizing that he was a few rationalizations away from pinning her against that altar. A man will always twist logic to meet his own ends. _Do it for your country, for the Bible readers. She teeters on the edge of heresy. It would only take the right kind of push._

In the end it was that blasted knuckle that had stopped him. And those saucy words. Something his Mary might have said. He remembers the day when he told her about the knuckle--the day of the eel pies. The beauty of her face half-covered in flour, her hand in his as he spoke to the paupers. He drifts off, remembering what it was like to curl around her in sleep, the curve of her backside against him; to wake in the morning and reach out for her, his hand resting on the small of her back. These are stories he tells himself over and over before going to sleep every night. His Mary did not intervene in the chapel. The stories did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dwale: an anesthetic made up of, among other things, a mixture of sleep-inducing (not to mention poisonous) ingredients including alcohol, henbane, hemlock and opium. 
> 
> The idea of using ear trumpets to listen for mining crews during a siege dates back to the medieval period. In the 1530s some Italian forts were built with organized listening stations for counter-mining activities. Hertford castle sits on a network of tunnels that would be vulnerable to mining, but also make ideal listening posts. 
> 
> Gun shot wounds were cauterized with "seething" or boiling oil.


	8. Baptism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cromwell is anointed with water, Mary Tudor with fire

**November 1538**

The doctor comes infrequently. The bleeding is nearly at an end. Johane brings him his meals: the same bread and cheese, now and again a piece of boiled chicken and small beer. 

He is getting stronger, sometimes sitting up for an hour or so after he eats. Johane reads to him, Twyne’s translation of Sydrac. She grows irritable with the old king as he has a tendency to avoid answering Sydrac’s questions or lapse into homily.

“He’s like you, Thomas. He never answers straight.”

“Someone should write down our conversations. They might be at least as instructive.”

“When I ask ‘when will you send for your wife?’ you reply, “I have nothing to live on, no means to support her.’” 

“Which is true.”

“Perhaps, but it evades the question. And anyway, Rafe would help you. You’re not without friends.” 

“Now who is lapsing into homilies?”

“And when will you send for your wife?”

“You assume my wife would come.”

“You’re doing it again!”

“What does Sydrac say about nosey nurses?”

“Perhaps she is waiting for you to send for her.” 

“If that were the case, I’ve no doubt she would not be afraid to hint at it in a letter. Have you seen a letter from her, these weeks I’ve been here?”

“You have to write letters to--”

“To receive them. Yes, thank you Bocchus. Shouldn’t it be true for me as well? That she needs to write to me before I can write to her?”

Johanne sighs, tired of the argument, he supposes, and continues reading. 

That evening she has paper, pen, and ink brought up with his meal. 

**+++**

The doctor comes back, ordering undiluted wine. Johane takes him outside the sick room and he, Cromwell, can hear her arguments through the door. “But are not liver and kidney also said to feed the blood?” 

Wives tales, the doctor replies. Johane appeals to Rafe. The wine is brought up, so dilute you can see light through it. On the tray beside the wine are liver and kidneys.

**+++**

Sometimes Johane sits on his bed while he feigns sleep. He can feel her gaze on him, feel the tenderness and the fear. Perhaps she is working up the nerve to say something. Or else she is reminding herself why she ended things. Sometimes he thinks he can sense desire or longing in her gaze, but that might be wishful thinking. Does he wish? He feels so tired and hollow these days. After a bit she gets up and fusses with the curtain and when he “awakens” she always seems to be short-tempered and cross.

One day he asks, “What troubles you? Why are you cross?”

“I am not cross. I am only frustrated. It is not the same thing.”

He starts to ask why she is frustrated, but then he stops himself. He remembers that it’s been five years and that things are probably no better with John Williamson. It seems they are always falling into conversations that they should not have.

**+++**

The doctor returns in a week, checks him over. Says they are ready for the next phase of his treatment: ridding the patient of the excess of black bile that is the cause of melancholy complaint. The doctor is a man of science but he looks more like a priest, standing at the foot of the bed, raising his jar--tincture of hellebore--to the light. He soon comes to dread the doctor’s arrival as surely as a man on the rack resents his torturer. 

Johane comes less frequently.There is little for her to do. He takes no meals in the day. At night, he is given a draft to sleep. It gives him strange dreams. One night he imagines himself as a worm, slow and helpless, being pulled apart by a bird. On another occasion he dreams of hideous sweet meats: marchpane worked in the shapes of lobsters and vultures. He is never without a chill, though the fires are banked as high as may be. The room is never without the reek of vomit and shit. It is up to old Bill Spiggot, who worked for him at Austin Friars, to empty the buckets and chamber pots after the doctor has inspected them. He, Cromwell, is glad Johane has been spared this task.

A week passes before the doctor pronounces him cured. Bill Spiggot brings him bread and milk which he sops up with a half-weeping greed. Once he would have scorned such plain fare, would have demanded meat and spice. How long, maybe a week since his mouth watered at the the thought of Johane’s tray of kidneys. That was a different man, with an excess of black bile. Here is a new man and it is time he was baptized: Johane comes and orders a bath for him and a great vat of washing is drained for the occasion. 

He is wrapped in a sheet and carried by two strong men down the stairs to the laundry and deposited in the warm, soapy water. One might think, looking at him, of an ill-cooked turnip in a tepid, greasy soup: a limp tuber, past its prime, with a hint of mildew or the grave.

 **+++**

Weeks pass. Johane returns and finishes Sydrac. She ceases to chide him about the unused pen and ink in his room. Sometimes he will look at it for hours on end, staring, trying to make out from his vantage point the markings on the back side of the jar of ink. He can see it clearly in his mind though it is only fancy. 

One day Johane tells him that Mercy has gotten worse. That she won’t be coming back for some time.

“I will miss you,” he says, mustering a smile. “I look forward to seeing you. Even when you are cross.”

“If I were cross there would be a reason, something you’d done, or something amiss that could be mended, but this is just a plain fact of my life. It will never be any better.”

“Will you sit with me?”

“No.”

“I’m not up to anything,” he says, making an attempt to sit up and pat the bed with his hand.

“You keep saying that as if that makes it safe. Makes it all right. It won’t stop me wanting what I want.”

“Just sit here, please. Trust me.”

She sits on the bed, within arm’s reach. He puts his arm tentatively around her and she leans against him. She slowly curls into him, bringing her legs up on the bed. They lie like that for a long time. He feels her warmth, breathes the soapy smell of her hair, presses his palm against the bodice of her soft wool dress, feels her flesh there beneath, ready to yield to his hand. 

“I remember when you used to sneak into my bed at night,” he whispers.

“Thomas don’t…”

“Shhh. Trust me. Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember.”

“You would always be gone in the morning.”

“It’s what you wanted.”

“No. I used to wish you would still be there. That we could stay in bed all day together.”

“You never said. And even if you had, what could I do? The others would know.”

“The others knew anyway. Why did you run away?”

“Because I was ashamed. Every time, I promised myself it would be the last.”

He can hear her heart pounding in her chest. He lifts her chin, looks into her moist, gray eyes. She looks away, will not meet his gaze. He looks at her mouth, remembers the first time he kissed her, the night of the King’s dream, when Will Brereton came pounding on his door, frightening her half to death. ”I’m so sorry,” he whispers.

“It was five years ago.”

“No. I’m sorry that I’ve never been able to give you more. That the world is the way it is. That it was possible for me to remarry, but not with you. That now I can’t do more for you than this.” 

“I know all that. You don’t need to say it.”

“Yes, I do.” She relaxes against him, puts her hand across his chest. The quilt lies between them, an inviolable barrier. He wonders what would happen if she’d lift it, press her face against his bare chest, let her hands wander down his belly. It is merely a hypothetical question. His blood answers back that he could do nothing in any case.

“This is nice. But I should go,” she says, propping herself on her elbow. He can look down into her shirt. He remembers standing over her while she worked, the light on her hair and neck, his hand on her bosom. _I want to give you a present._

“Stay,” he says and sees the rapid rise and fall of her chest, sees a blush on her cheeks, sees her nipples erect, struggling against the shirt. He remembers what it was like to put his hand over them. Something within him: his ill humors, some of them, have survived the hellebore. She would have to do most of the work. He searches his memory, but he can’t remember a time with her like that. She was always passive. Lovely and warm and open and wet, but passive. It is his Mary that comes to mind when he thinks of a woman climbing on top of him, pushing him back into the pillows, riding him. _You mistake me for someone else. You always have._

She is waiting now. Waiting for him to do something more than speak. The moment passes. She sighs and swings her legs over the bed onto the floor. 

“You look so unhappy,” he says as she smooths her hands over her skirt.

“Thanks,” she says curtly. “You’ve made it worse, you know.”

“I know. I thought if I held you… I was mistaken. I’m sorry.”

“Please stop apologizing. I think it’s best if I don’t come back anymore.”

_Every time I told myself it would be the last._

“I understand. Take care, Johane.”

“I will. Thomas, there’s one thing I want you to do. Will you promise me you’ll try?”

“What is it?”

“When you are yourself again, I want you to write to your wife. Send for her. Send for your daughters.”

“And live where? With what?”

“You’ll get back on your feet. Rafe will help you.”

“Rafe struggles as it is. He has lost most of his business thanks to the war. And his contacts, many of them, won’t set foot in his house because I’m here.”

“Thomas you exaggerate. You’re feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Am I? Ask yourself, why has Margery Vaughn not come round? She blames me for her husband’s death.”

“Rafe can survive without Margery Vaughn.”

“Not really. It’s what she represents. The tradespeople from the city. The Bible Readers. They used to be my people. Now they blame me. They hate me.”

“Not all of them. Mendes speaks well of you. Asks when you can be fit for company. If anyone has a right to hold Mary Tudor against you, it’s your Converso friends.”

“When have you seen Mendes?”

“I went to sell some of Mercy’s furs. We need the money to pay for her doctor. Rafe said Mendes has a friend who is a furrier.”

“Did you get a good price?”

“I haven’t had a chance to bring them to him yet. You’re changing the subject again. My point was that not everyone has forgotten you so quickly.”

“Even if I somehow could afford to keep my wife and family, the Queen will never let them come back.”

“You don’t know that.”

“She’s told me as much.”

“Perhaps if Gregory works on her.” 

He laughs.

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s only that he seems to have some influence. Perhaps he can convince her.”

“I wouldn’t trust his influence to last.” After all, his did not. 

“Then when you are stronger, you must go to her. She is abroad?”

“She doesn’t want me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve lost her son.”

“She will forgive you, if you let her. She is a kind woman and she loves you.” Johane’s voice is soothing, reasonable; the tone one takes with a willful child. Something about it makes him irritable and ashamed all at once. 

“You are right. It’s not that. I know she will forgive me.”

“Then what?”

“It is that she should not forgive me. I do not deserve it.”

“Oh Thomas,” she says, stepping forward, touching his hair. “Always the weight of the world. Can you not put it aside for a bit?”

“It’s not that easy,” he says, shaking his head, freeing himself of her piteous touch. She withdraws her hand, looking stung.

“I will go now. I will not be back.” And with that she leaves, shutting the door crisply behind her. She’ll be back, he tells himself, and lies there: lies there that night and many after, listening for her footstep in the hall. 

**Lady Day 1536**

The Marquis of Exeter volunteers as emissary, saving them all a few meetings. A small skirmish is planned as a diversion so the Marquis and his band of men can escape on their mission. A dozen men sneak out of a tunnel and surprise the mining crews who work through the night. The mines are wrecked, the miners scattered, and Exeter makes it out unseen. The raiding party, led by Gregory and Richard, returns triumphant. 

The princess plans a small feast in honor of the new year. A very small feast, as supplies are running low. It is the time of year, or so he, Cromwell, is told. He manages a couple of lambs, the best the local people can offer. The siege has hit them hard: fields burned, pastures dug up by mining and sapping. The rumour is that Anne Boleyn plans to serve 25 lambs -- one for every day of the month -- for her Lady Day Feast at Whitehall.

He is seated with his boys, down table from the Princess. That suits him. They have not spoken since that night in the chapel. He has thrown himself into his work, had his meals sent to the forge to avoid company. During the feast, Mary raises toasts to Richard and Gregory; the Seymours and Reginald Pole grit their teeth and raise their glasses. He catches her eye once but she looks down at her plate, seemingly entranced by her lamb. 

The Seymour brothers come into the forge one day to have their swords sharpened. Their errand is absurdly transparent. They could have a servant bring their swords, but they want to talk or perhaps just gloat.

“Did you hear the news Cromwell?” Tom Seymour asks.

“Of course he didn’t, brother,” Edward says. “He never leaves the forge these days. The princess forsakes her favorite.”

He looks from one to the other then back to his grindstone.

“They say Exeter has Harry Percy and his father on side. That Stafford and Darcy are sure to join as well. I wonder, Cromwell, if you have more enemies in our camp than with the Boleyns.” 

He lifts the sword to the light, sees some pitting that needs work. 

“And when they have gathered enough men, they will ride down to London and take the Boleyn woman. Your old friend. Maybe you can have adjoining cells in the Tower.”

He tilts the sword so that it sends up a few sparks. Tom Seymour must take a step backward to avoid them. When they have gloated their fill, he sends word through Henry that he’d like to meet with the princess. Rather than send her guard to fetch him, she accompanies Henry to the forge.

“No one sees you these days, Cromwelll.” Her tone is brusk, impatient. She stands well back from the forge, still holding Henry’s arm.

“I have my work. I saw no need to interfere.”

“And now?”

“Now, I am given to believe by the Seymours that Courtenay will ride on London as soon as he has gathered enough men.”

“That is the general plan, yes.”

“Did you stop to consider that if he takes London he might install himself as King?”

“Surely not. He rides in my name.”

“Rides yes, but he believes he has a stronger claim to it than you, and who knows what he will do, with the crown just sitting there at his feet.”

“We will set forth as soon as he arrives at the city. We will be sure to be there.”

“Then we will be sure to witness the slaughter of innocent people, the burning of the whole town. Do you think they will blame you or Courtenay?” She has no time to answer before he continues. “Since he rides in your name, I think we can assume they will blame you.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Leave here as soon as possible and meet them en route to London. We camp somewhere between here and London and hope to draw Anne out.”

“Draw her out? How?”

“There are two ways. I suggest we try both. We attack her people in Kent. Take hostages, commit the odd outrage that her brother and father won’t let stand. And we make sure seen as the true leader of this army..”

“I like the first idea. I suppose you are glad to be ordering hostages rather than serving as one.”

“It did cross my mind. And the second idea?“

“I don’t see what good it will do.”

“Do you not? Anne is a vain woman. She does not suffer others to be the center of attention. You ride in your armour with no little glamour, men riding behind you with banners, relive your grandmother’s glory at Segovia. What ancestry has Anne to celebrate? She can throw another dinner, buy a new dress, but everyone will talk of the princess who leads an army. The princess who would be queen and, they will whisper, should be queen.”

“You know the concubine better than almost anyone. If you think it will work--”

“There is no way it can fail,” he says, not at all certain that it will work. The woman that led the triumph at the masque in Calais might have changed these past few weeks, as Mary Tudor has. As they all have. 

“Must we leave immediately? Have I no time to decide?”

“We can not stay here much longer. We have no way to restock powder, bolts for crossbows, or even rocks for the catapult. One night soon, the sappers will reach a tunnel or get close enough to undermine the walls with gunpowder. It is only a matter of time -- a few weeks, a month at the most. As a gambling man, I would not bet my life on it.” 

“You said we could last months.”

“And we may yet, it is true. There is that possibility, that they will continue to tunnel blindly. That luck will continue in our favor. Certainly the raid bought us a few days,” he says. “My estimates were based on the Boleyn’s ability to bring guns to the fight. And in that, at least, I have been borne out. No big guns have arrived. No gunmaker has arrived. But my sources in town say that they are bringing diggers in from all over. I would be remiss in my duties not to tell you that.”

There is a pause. She is looking at him. Recalculating his worth. He has no idea if his stock has gone up or down.

“This plan of yours to draw the concubine out… how would you hit them in Kent?”

“I have my people there. The Boleyns have always had difficulty keeping servants. For the first time in twenty years they have steady, reliable help, courtesy of their son-in-law.”

“Can you get word to them?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Then have her house burned, her mother taken prisoner. That will draw the father and brother away from us. And the infant, Elizabeth? Where have they moved her?”

“Surely the princess is out of bounds?”

“I am a princess and was not out of bounds, Cromwell, as you know. Where is she?”

“The smart thing would be to bring her to London, move her from palace to palace.”

“Can you get your hands on her?”

He shakes his head. He does have people in Lady Shelton’s train, but he has no idea how to contact them. He is fairly certain he would not tell Mary even if he did.

“If I find you are lying, withholding..”

“I would never--”

“You will meet the same fate.”

He bows and begs his leave. This marks a new chapter in his service to the Tudor family. The threats were always there, implicit with Henry. His daughter makes no pretense to niceness. He can not help but admire her honesty, though it goes against one of his oldest rules: if you are going to kill a man, best not to threaten him with it ahead of time.

**+++**

**April 13, 1436**

Henry rides at his sister’s side, watching her, smiling when she smiles, looking sad when she looks sad. When they passed through the ruined hills around Hertford she looked very sad indeed. Tom said that is what the Boleyns have done. Henry supposes that he is a Boleyn too, though Mary doesn’t seem to mind.

What an adventure they have had! Sneaking out of the castle under the cover of darkness, sleeping in peaked-roof tents like Arthur’s knights. He hears them talking at night when they think he is asleep. He lies awake listening to the night birds and watching a spider make a web in the corner. They say that Courtenay has brought many more than expected. They have 5,000 men, with more to come soon. They say that his aunt Anne is coming. When she gets here the battle can begin. He is not to refer to her as his aunt Anne, especially around his sister. Tom says he doesn’t care if he still thinks of her as his aunt. She is still his sister-in-law, after all. No one is to use the name Cromwell around the new troops. Some of them think Tom has done bad things.

He, Henry, wears a chain mail vest and a helmet. Mary says as soon as she is queen she will make him a knight. She calls him Master Henry, which he likes. Tom says he can stand in the rear of the battle with the pages. His sister says he should not be seen to carry armour like a servant. How else could he be useful? She says he is too small to ride with her in the battle. 

At night he walks with Tom around the camp. It goes on for miles it seems. They look down from the edge at Wellham Green below. There are hundreds of tents and campfires. Tom says to be quiet so they can hear the other side singing. They see bats fly out above their heads. It is a clear night. He points out the stars he knows to Tom. Tom says he never learned about the stars, except in books. They walk back to their tent. He is too excited to sleep. Tom says “go to bed anyway.” He wants to think of something cheeky to say back but all he can think of is “Go to bed yourself, man.” Tom laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you say to the person who always comes through for you when you repeatedly fail to manage your time effectively? "Thank you, Lynne" doesn't seem adequate.


	9. Dispatches

**April 15, 1536**

Richard comes into the tent with a lamp, hangs it on a peg, yawning. He, Cromwell, sits up, begins dressing with smooth motions and strong fingers. He has not slept; his eyes burn in the light.

“What about the boy? Should I wake him?”

“Let him sleep.” God knows I wish I could he thinks.

Richard helps him into his mail shirt. He gasps a little at the cold, dead weight of it on his shoulders.

“There’s a fire outside. You’d best go stand near it.” He nods and walks out, obedient. Gregory is there, armour polished, eyes gleaming eagerly in the firelight. 

“And I didn’t want you to joust. Now look at you.” 

Gregory smiles.

“Take care not to get yourself flattened. That goes for you as well,” he says, turning to Richard.

“Someone should wake the Princess,” Richard says. Gregory blushes. 

“Don’t get excited. He didn’t mean you.” They stand for a moment contemplating who would be best suited for this errand. In the weak dawn light they lean toward the fire, stretching their hands, warming their shanks, until Henry appears, fully dressed, a small sword in his belt.

“Good morning,” Henry says brightly and they all smile and bid him good morning before sending him to wake his sister.. 

+++

Mary Tudor is breakfasting in her tent though she doesn’t look as if she’s touched her food. 

“You should eat. Big day today.”

“You sound like my ladies.”

With ink-stained fingers she hands him a piece of paper, black with writing and corrections. “Read this.”

_My loyal friends. My mother smiles on me today to see so many of her countrymen in support of her daughter. My father at the Battle of the Spurs, My grandfather at Bosworth, would see us to victory. I believe they ride with us in spirit to reclaim the throne for the Tudors away from the Usurper. God knows if our hearts be pure we shall not fail._

_We have waited a long time for the Concubine to ride out to meet us. I hear that she has at last left her tower. Well, what do we say to her? What greeting do we have for the evil Usurper? We shall speak only with our swords and our bows and she will not fail to hear. History will not stop its ears to what we say. My father is listening. My grandfather is listening. And may the Concubine tremble: God is listening._

“You should hold for a response when you mention your mother. She was ever the beloved of the Northern folk.”

She nods. “I can’t eat. I feel sick.”

“Nerves. It’s natural before a battle to feel--”

“No, there is more. I am ill. My...female complaint. Must I stand long?”

“Only to give your speech. Then you may sit upon your horse.” She smiles weakly. “Take a half pint of black ale. My wife swears by a half pint of black ale.” She shrugs and he decides to see it as agreement. He rushes out of the tent in search of it. Gregory and Richard are outside waiting. “Her Majesty needs some black ale. Fetch her some.”

Gregory comes back with a full cup spilling every few steps. The sky is turning pink over their heads. He takes the cup from his son and goes back inside the tent, alone.

“This is from your well wishers outside.”

“Thank you.” She takes the cup but does not drink.

He sits. “Get that down you. It will help your nerves as well.” 

“Will you not join me?” She slides the cup toward him. Surely she doesn’t suspect poison?

“Very well,” he says, taking a few swallows. He slides the cup back to her and she lifts it with both hands and drinks like one who is used to being ordered to swallow draughts. 

“When this is over, Princess, will you take a glass of wine with them, your well wishers?”

“I will”

“That will be the best comfort. The best incentive not to--”

“They will die, some of them, won’t they?” Her voice is only curious. Her eyes swim.

“Yes,” he says and places a gloved hand over her cold little fingers. She does not pull away. Words crawl halfway up his throat and get stuck there. “If it makes you feel any better, every man here is as terrified as the next. They may not show it. You would be wise to pretend not to see it.”

She nods, lifts the cup again and drains it. “Sometimes we drink our courage.”

“More than you know,” he smiles.

+++

He takes his place in line with the other short range archers. Why not? He has nothing better to do of an afternoon. Maybe he’ll get lucky and a Boleyn will ride into his sights. Gregory and Richard are with the cavalry on top of the hill. Henry stands with the pages, trying not to work. Mary is speaking: the wind blows her words away. He hears a cheer go up from the riders, then horses snuffling, pounding the earth as they form ranks. He feels hot, then cold. His stomach is empty. He wishes he’d had the nerve to eat. 

The new guns brought down from the North have been dug into the hill on either side. It is to be a variation on the skirmish at Hunsdon House: draw the rabbits into the net. Down on the green there is movement, a mass of mounted riders coming together into a regular form. He wonders if Henry can see it from his position with the pages. It is an impressive sight. 

He’d best put on his helmet. It is starting sooner than he’d thought.

+++

The guns roar out from both sides. A few rounds and all he can hear is a ringing like a bell. His short range archers wait for those who make it past the guns to come in range. He can’t see a flaming thing in his helmet and longs to take it off, but figures he’d better keep it on, as much to keep from being recognized as anything. 

He gets off perhaps a dozen shots before he sees the familiar Falcon emblem. He takes aim for the neck, just like at Hunsdon, but before he can fire: a flame in his shoulder, blood in his mouth. A ricochet from their own damn guns. He drops his shattered crossbow and wanders away, stunned, holding his right shoulder with his left hand. He staggers up the hill amid the smoke and confusion. He wanders into the deserted camp, finds his tent and lies down, waiting to die.

+++

When he comes to there are voices. It is late, well past mid-day by the shadows on the wall of the tent. He stumbles out into the beautiful spring sunshine and looks around. Mary Tudor is standing there with the head of Thomas Boleyn at her feet. The eyes stare up blankly at him. His Mary used to take off her father’s boots.

“The day is yours, Princess,” Tom Seymour says, kneeling.

He staggers forward. Mary Tudor turns to observe him coolly. “Master Cromwell is hurt. See to him, “ she says. His vision clouds. He goes down again.

+++

Would that you could be put to sleep when the surgeon comes with the vice grips to fetch the grape and the strong arms to hold you down. Would that you could not know the queer sensation of another man’s hands under your skin. Would that you could not smell your own flesh burning as he applies the seething oil. Would that you could not hear the screams of the dying as they lie beneath a shower of pitch in the burning forest. Would that you were in a garden in France, a garden in Italy. 

+++

As night falls, the remnants of Anne’s army are driven into the forest, set alight with flying pitch. Past the Wicked Wood they find themselves in a boggy moor overlooked by Hatfield House. It is strange to die in view of a child’s nursery, in domestic shrubs and leisure paths. The Queen can not be found among her men. Mary Tudor comes to see him, as he is newly bandaged and propped up near a fire. She frowns and taps her foot and demands to know why they have not found the Concubine. He tries to shrug but he can’t move his shoulder. Tom Seymour suggests that she has escaped. Mary looks as if she will ask for Tom Seymour’s head next. He, Cromwell, suggests in an off-handed way that they might search Hatfield House. It is natural she would go to familiar ground. Mary sends a patrol to search the house. He wonders idly where Henry has got to.

+++

It is dawn. They are loading the wounded into wagons and his turn is soon to come. He has appealed to Gregory and Richard, both bloody and exhausted, but thank God with only cuts and bruises, to look again for the boy. They circle the camp, calling Henry’s name, but get no reply. They inquire of the pages, who say that they have not seen him since early the day before, when the first cavalry charges were made. They return, shaking their heads.

He takes a torch and slowly begins making his way down the blasted hill. Men have worked through the night stacking the bodies into piles. He puts the torch close to the faces and tries to cover his nose as best he can with his wound. A few familiar faces, including Stephen Vaughn. He loved him. He can admit that now. More faces, some boys even, but no Henry. He walks on. Pile after pile for hours until the last of the wagons of wounded is leaving. He must go or stay here with the dead.

+++

The last wagon is loaded with wounded prisoners. He sits across from John Dudley, who inquires after the queen. 

“They found her with her brother, hiding in the attic of Hunsford House. She has been taken on ahead to the Tower.” He thinks that he is glad they were not found in bed together. Though it would have been a coup of sorts. 

As the wagon moves slowly over the blasted track, his mind races ahead, piecing together the countryside, trying to imagine a way Henry might have gotten lost, wandered off. The others, Mary included, believe he is dead and they looked at him with pity, waiting for him to arrive at the same conclusion. Something in his mind won’t let it go. He can not feel that Henry is dead. Perhaps it would be easier, but no, never say that, never think it. His Mary would not forgive him, should not forgive him for bringing her son to such a dangerous place. The world is a dangerous place. We are cruel to bring children into it at all.

“How is your boy, Robert?” he asks of John Dudley.

“Good, very good, and joined by Charles and Guildford since you were last with us.” Dudley smiles. “Do you think we will be held long? Or do they plan to--”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course. But tell me, how did you come to be a prisoner? I did not see you this morning in the camp. And I had heard a rumor that you had become a Papist.”

“No, not exactly. But I am not a prisoner. I fought on the other side today.” The others in the wagon beside Dudley look up at him, incensed by his words. Dudley remains calm, only nods. He is glad they’ve all had their weapons taken away. 

+++

**Twelfth Night, 1539**

Rafe and Bill Spiggot switch places for the night. Rafe wears Spiggot’s old mildewed leather waistcoat. He, Cromwell, sits in the courtyard, bundled in fur, close to the fire. In a chair. Not on a bench. Never again on a bench. Spiggot swings into view, wobbling a bit already with drink, and sits down heavily on a log. “Tom!” he shouts. Oh he is enjoying this, the old sod. Spiggot has not forgotten who put down his rebellion when he worked at Austin Friars. But when a man has carried your bodily waste away for months on end and has never made you feel a moment’s loss of dignity for it, then perhaps he can be indulged.

“Master Sadler!” he calls back. “Where is Mistress Sadler?” Spiggot looks around the courtyard for his counterpart, a maid from the kitchens. 

“God only knows,.” Spiggot says thickly and then, after a short, almost-polite pause: “I hear Mercy Pryor is beyond the help of a doctor. Won’t be long now.”

“I have heard as much as well. It is bad news. Still, she has been very ill before and recovered.”

“You were always very fond of your mother-in-law, weren’t you?” 

“We all were. Except that reprobate, Old Bill Spiggot! Remember when he started trouble about not wanting to work for Mercy?”

Spiggot glares at him, takes a drink from the bowl, looks as if he’s about to pass it on and then thinks better of it: still following Johane’s orders. 

“It was only that he did not care for the way you trifiled with certain members of your own family.”

He looks at the old man, shocked. Something rises within him, that blackest of bile, anger. 

His rage is interrupted by Rafe’s musicians who troop out and play a seldom-heard tune: Pastime with Good Company. Spiggot gets up and dances, his spindly legs working like springs: they rock him up and down to the music while he claps a quarter beat out of time. The singers arrive at their “free will” just as a commotion at the back of the house makes them break off. 

A group of strangers, costumed as peasants, are ushered out of the house and into the courtyard by Helen, dressed in one of her old laundress work gowns. She brings one of them forward to him: a tall, narrow stripling with a lean face and sharp cheekbones. 

He sets aside his fur and stands, looking to Helen for explanation. The stripling steps forward and embraces him,saying: “Master Cromwell. You did not die.” 

He takes the boy by the shoulders, turning him towards the firelight. “Dear God, is it you? Is it really you, my boy?” He studies the face: the same long, narrow nose, the high color in his cheeks, the same impish eyes contemplating an impertinent remark. “Henry, let me look at you! How you have grown! I might not have recognized you. Taller than your mother now!” His voice cracks at this and he buries his face in the boy’s rough wool cloak, not releasing him for many moments until the tears have subsided.

Rafe comes forward, staring in disbelief, before offering a seat to the Knolls: the group is comprised of actual peasants, then, not merchants dressed up for the revelry. Master Knoll takes Bill Spiggot’s place. Spiggot looks drunk enough not to care that he has lost his title. The Knolls sit staring into the fire, warming their hands, and there is a moment of quiet in which the only sound is Helen Stadler weeping with joy. Finally Rafe goes to her and takes her inside for a glass of strong wine. For -- the story moves swiftly round the fire -- it was Helen who answered the door as part of her Twelfth Night duties and Helen who recognized Henry instantly and raised the whole house with her cry of delight. 

Henry and the Knolls are given food and drink and they eat with quiet zeal. 

“You are changed, Master Cromwell,” Henry says, studying him. 

“Not for the better, I imagine.” The boy looks away with a polite silence. “What’s this about me dying, anyway?”

“The day of the battle. I saw you dead. I went into the tent to fetch a hat. It was cold standing with the pages in the wind. You were there on the ground lying in blood. The grass was wet with it. I tried to wake you, but you would not rouse. I heard noises outside the tent. I waited until they’d gone and I fled up into the hills. I meant to go back, honestly, but I got lost in the brush. I thought if I moved downhill I would find the camp again, but I must have crossed over into another valley. I walked for a long time down hill and then I met people farming.”

John Knoll takes over the narrative, “We was planting for me brother, who lives near Hatfield. He had been ill, see. Crops still need putting in the ground though, no matter how a man feels. We come from Luton about twenty miles north, to work his patch for him. Me wife it was who saw the boy, standing in the bushes, watching us. ‘Come out,’ she says, thinking it was a soldier, for we could hear the guns.”

“You still kept planting, even though you could hear the guns? Weren’t you afraid?”

“Like I said, Master Cromwell, crops still need putting in the ground. As it were, the battle moved in the other direction. The noise dying down as the day went on.”

“It was my fault. I told them my father was dead and my mother was far away. I was ashamed for running away, thinking my sister wouldn’t want me back as I was a coward.”

“She would have run away if she could have, lad. We all would have.”

“We took him home with us, all the time asking about his people. We knew he come from some money. He could read and write when none of us can. And the way he speaks, like a gentleman. He is a good helper on the farm. Never complains and works like a man, though he is only a boy. He doesn’t half eat though! Growing like a weed, my wife says. See we have a daughter but no son of our own. And we come to think of Henry like our own.” 

He nods, understanding. “The same happened to me. I am not the boy’s natural father. He told no lie there--the father, God rest him, is dead. Henry has a way of getting under your skin. You can’t help but love him,” he says, patting Henry on the head, displacing the boy’s hat. Henry takes the hat off, revealing a shock of ginger hair that glows in the fire.

“That’s new. It was more blonde than anything when you left. Another red-headed Tudor.” 

At the name, the Knolls exchange a worried look.

“Master Stadler will give you all rooms for the night. The Queen will want to see her brother soon and, I imagine, thank you in person for keeping him safe.”

The Knolls absorb this latest shock. Someone hands them the bowl of wassail which they drink from in earnest. 

“Tell me how you came here? Why no letter?”

“Some weeks back me brother is in the tavern, see, and someone says they seen a pamphlet saying there was a boy lost around those parts, and did not his brother find a boy when he come to work? My brother can’t read neither but a week or so later he lays hands on one of them pamphlets and a week after that, got it to one of the friars that lives in the village. The friar reads the pamphlet and me brother hears the bit about the reward and he makes up his mind to send it on to us as soon as he could. It wasn’t till the Feast of St. Thomas that he could get away long enough to get word. He had to travel up to us, you see.”

Henry hangs his head as John Knoll carries on speaking. “At first the boy read the pamphlet wrong to trick us.”

“I was scared. They didn’t know -- still don’t -- who my mother is. And when I heard that my aunt and uncle were in the Tower, and my grandfather--”

“It’s all right, son. You were right to be wary. What made you change your mind?”

“I kept the pamphlet and looked at it, read and reread it every day until I knew it by heart. I could hear your words in it, I believed. Like you were speaking to me. And then it was Christmas Eve and I thought about Christmas at Austin Friars. Remember? When it snowed? And the loveliest chicken contest? That was the happiest time of my life. And even though I knew that things wouldn’t be the same with mother and the girls abroad, I wanted the chance to see you again. Reckoned if you went to the trouble to make the pamphlet you must really want to see me.”  
He nods, throat tightening. He pulls himself together and turns to the Knolls. “The boy’s mother is my wife, Mary, sister of Anne Boleyn.” 

The Knolls gasp. “Is it wise to turn him over to the Queen? Might she not--”

“I believe Mary Tudor has nothing but love for Henry. She would wish him well and do much for him. She was cast down terribly when she thought he was dead.”

“She thought I was dead?”

“We all did. Well, except for me. I was too stubborn and too afraid of your mother to believe it.”

Henry laughs and then looks up suddenly, afraid, “My mother! Does she think I am dead?”

“I do not know. I have not written to her since before we left Hertford. I could not bring myself to write the words. She knows generally that we won the war, I believe. Knows your sister is Queen. Frescobaldi would have heard that much.” 

“I must write to her tomorrow. Let her know that we live. You have made her suffer cruelly by not writing to her,” Henry says. John Knoll looks troubled by the boy’s words. 

“I know it. I am sorry. You shall write the letter, tell her everything, and she will be relieved.” He struggles to his feet. “Bill, will you help me upstairs? I am tired and need to rest. Then you must find room for Henry and these good people.” He turns to John Knoll, “You don’t mind waiting to meet the Queen to get your reward, do you? I am in somewhat reduced circumstances. As you see, dependent on old friends.”

“We never wanted a reward, Master Cromwell,” Mistress Knoll says. “We only wanted the boy to go with his rightful people. As much as we like him, we reckoned there was someone who needed him more.”

“I will help you up,” Henry says, standing, taking his arm, and then smiling, “Lean on me, Tom.”

+++

**January 20, 1539**

He sits with Henry in Rafe’s library. The boy has a stack of books beside him. He has never seen anyone read so hungrily. “I have a lot to catch up on,” the boy says. “One of the reasons I read that pamphlet of yours, though it was no great work of genius, was that it was the first writing I’d seen in more than a year.”

“Your mother will be pleased that you keep to your books. You will soon be caught up, if not to yourself, than to any other boy of your age.” He thinks of Gregory at thirteen. You couldn’t keep him inside long enough to read a book, and even when the weather and the lack of birds to shoot conspired against him, he would only read King Arthur stories.

“I do hope we hear from her soon.”

“I look forward to it myself,” he lies. He is full of dread. She can have nothing but contempt for him.

“When you are well, Tom, we must go to her.”

“Perhaps you should go on alone. I will follow when I am able.”

“No, I won’t leave you again,” Henry says. The boy is certainly forthright and there is a tone of command in his voice these days. It must be in the blood. The Knolls wouldn’t have taught him that.

Rafe’s clerk comes in with a letter and a purse. Probably someone paying Rafe what they owe. Money lending has kept him afloat when other business dried up.

“This is for you, Master Cromwell,” the clerk says. 

“It can’t be already...surely,” he says, breaking open the seal with a shaking hand. He scans down the page. “It is not from your mother. It is from Mistress Williamson.”

_Thomas:_

_You have probably heard our bad news as I heard of your good. They happened at almost the same time. I told you that you would land on your feet as always. Some weeks back I took Mercy’s furs to Moldanado whom Mendes recommended to us, remember? His offer was most generous, and went far beyond what we needed for the doctor. It seemed to me that Mendes had some hand in it, and that it was Mendes’s affection for you at the root of it._

_I told John Williamson that the money I received was half what it really was. I have put some aside where he can not get to it and the rest I am turning over to you to invest as you see fit. Take yourself out of this place and go back to your wife. You have the boy. You have your miracle. I am pleased that I could play some small part in it. You will pay me back with interest when you can and I will live like a grand lady in my widowhood, a state I look forward to more every day. You have my permission to think of me and smile while you sit in the sun with your wife and family about you._

_Yours with affection,_  
Johane  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to Onstraysod for continued hand-holding, moral support and last minute editing.


	10. Brothers and Sisters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Siblings torn apart; siblings bound together.

**May 1536**

Rafe Sadler’s house sits on an ordinary street, is not behind walls, and has no guard house, no gate. Once, Stephen Vaughn bought a lock for Austin Friars’ gate. Now Stephen Vaughn is dead and his lock smashed, the place within looted. Rafe tells him the news calmly when he asks why he has not been taken to Austin Friars. “There is no Austin Friars, Master, not as we knew it.”

His room at Rafe’s house is small but warm, down the hall from the master bedroom. It is a room for the best guest. A better room than Helen’s children have. But still he worries: what will his wife and daughters have to come home to? When he finds Henry, where will they put him? 

Rafe is silent when he brings up Henry at breakfast. When did he, Cromwell, become a person to be humored and pitied and cared for and ignored? 

There is music and dancing in the streets. Mary Tudor is to be crowned Queen. Rafe and Helen attend at Gregory’s invitation. He, Cromwell, says he is too ill to go with them. If he is not to wear scarlet and stand at the back of the cathedral and sweat for her then he wants no part of it. That evening, when it is over, the others return quietly drunk, politely merry, while he lies in bed watching the shadows cast on the wall by his tidy fire. He should write his Mary, tell her he’s well, that they have had a victory of sorts, but there is no way to explain about Henry. He must find Henry soon. She will be worried.

+++

Rafe doesn’t want him to go on his errand to the Tower. Perhaps that is why he offers no horse, no wagon. 

“You should rest more. Your shoulder is not fully healed,” Helen insists.

“If I rest much longer I will have missed the opportunity altogether. My wife will not forgive me if I don’t at least try.”

“They did try to kill you,” Rafe reminds him. “They smashed down your gate so your house could be looted. I don’t see the point of visiting them, except to shame him.”

“She would want me to see them. In case they have a message for her.”

“Was trying to murder her husband not message enough?” Rafe asks.

In the end he picks a fine day, the eighteenth of May, for his errand. He tells his hosts that he is only going out for a walk. They eye him skeptically but let him go. He wears his sturdiest boots and carries a cloak against the chill in the Tower. The chief gaoler, Lord Kingston, remembers him. He asks after Kingston’s son who was born when More was in the Tower. George Boleyn is being held in the same cell in which Little Bilney was held. It helps to find that old anger. It is what kept him coming to visit Thomas More when they both knew it was futile. He follows Kingston quickly past the door of More’s old cell. No time for ghosts today. They find George lying on the bed, still dressed in the remnants of his battle dress. There is a clean suit of fine clothes on the back of a chair, presumably being kept nice for the execution. 

George looks up, squinting in the dim. “Cromwell, what the hell are you doing here? Come to have your revenge?”

There is something in George that has always tested his patience so that, even now, he feels his anger pulling against a chain, begging to be let free. Was there ever a time when he didn’t want to gut George Boleyn like a fish? 

“If I did, would that be so surprising? You did try to have me killed.”

“I should have known you wouldn’t die with any decency. Instead you turn traitor, help the Papists. Hope you’re happy with your new Queen. The Tower will soon be full of your old friends.”

He sits down in a chair, pulling his cloak around himself. “I’ve come on an errand on behalf of my wife. Have you any last words you wish to convey to her?”

“None that can be repeated.”

“She never hated you, George. Though she had every reason.”

“I really don’t give a fuck what she thinks of me. Anyway, I’m glad she had sense to get free of you eventually. She’ll have found someone new to keep her by now.”

“You are probably right about all of it, George. I may be in one of these rooms myself in due time,” he says, rising to go. “I hope you die well, brother. I am glad they’ve given you decent clothes. I would be there but I have pressing business back in Hertfordshire.” He steps to the door and signals for the guard to let him out. 

“Cromwell, wait.” 

He stops, looks down at Boleyn. He hopes there won’t be a message after all.

“You will be in to see Anne as well?”

“I’m headed there now.”

“They won’t let me see her.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No. Just...tell her from me that I’m sorry. And that...I love her.”

He had not anticipated this: he motions again for the guard who is conversation with another, damn him.

“Do you think they’ll kill her?”

“I expect so.” 

At this, an animal cry from Boleyn. He lurches forward, driving his head into the side of his cot repeatedly, drawing blood. He, Cromwell, shouts to the guard and then moves forward, cautiously, approaching the way one does a wounded buck, afraid to tear his own wound open. The guards get through the door at last and pull George up, his face awash with snot and blood. The guards pull him back onto the bed; one actually sits on him to keep him still while the other binds his hands. He shakes his head and turns to leave.

“Cromwell! Wait! You have some influence. You could plead for her. She is not in her right mind.”

“Have you seen yourself, brother?”

“So help me God, I am of sound mind. But she is not. After the battle, when we were hiding in the house, it was a game to her. She thought we were children playing back at Hever.”

She would not be the first to feign madness to escape the executioner, of course, but he looks at George, sees beyond the desperation, the wild show of grief, and feels the truth of it. 

Anne’s apartments are on the opposite side of the Tower, where the windows--some of the finest glass in England--take in the early summer light. He knows every brick, every inch of drapery, saw to every piece of upholstery himself. This time, of course, the guards are there to keep her in, while her ladies attend to keep watch, make sure she doesn’t do herself a harm before the execution. Can’t have the new Queen denied her entertainment. 

Lady Kingston sits with her needlework in the colored light cast by Anne’s windows. When she sees him enter, she stands and glides out to him with a curtsey. He bows. 

“How is your charge today, my lady?”

“Pretending to madness,” Lady Kingston says flatly.

“May I see her?”

“She is at prayer. But she will not be much longer.”

“Is it not possible that her complaint is genuine? Would not losing your husband and son on the same day drive you mad?”

“Perhaps. But I am not Anne Boleyn. If she was mad with grief, she kept it hidden until after they lost the war.” Lady Kingston is no friend to Anne Boleyn and yet she is less of a torment than Anne’s aunts, who snigger at him from the corner. He shoots them a cautioning look, a hollow threat, as if he has any office to back it up. It is only because the Kingstons remember him as someone of importance that he has even been admitted here. 

“Cremuel!” a voice says, tinkling, full of genuine warmth. “I did not expect to see you here.”

“Well, I imagine not. Did you think me dead?”

She looks puzzled for a moment and then laughs with a hint of uncertainty. “Everyone knows you cannot be killed. That you will always talk your way out of it, say what you need to survive.” 

She crosses and takes him by the arm, leads him to a chair, begging him to sit and be comfortable. Her clutching hand, cold and pale, reminds him of Mary Tudor. Her face has begun to line. It shows in the harsh May light. She looks smaller, too, than he remembered. Perhaps it is the months since the King’s death that have done the work. Perhaps it is just that his memory enlarges and refines everyone: even his enemies look handsomer in his mind’s eye. 

“I have a message for the King if you will take it to him.”

He does not answer, but that has never been a deterrent to her. 

“Tell him that I want the gold dress sent to me. The one I ordered and had made up for the day. There has been some mistake. They have sent me this gray thing,” she says, running her hand over the cloud-colored velvet of her bodice. “Nice enough, I suppose, for a Wednesday, but not for the Abbey. I should wear something truly regal, don’t you think?”

He pulls his cloak tighter around himself. The sun streams in on him, but he feels chilled.

“And I would like to see my father.” 

“That may not be possible, my lady.” 

Lady Shelton stifles a laugh. Thomas Boleyn’s body lies in Hertfordshire in a mass grave. His head is fast leathering on Tower Bridge. Birds pick at his eyeballs. Children throw rocks at his brow.

“I bring a message from your brother, my lady.” He keeps his tone light. “He says he’s sorry and sends his love.”

Anne beams. “Does he? The dear. Well, it wouldn’t be quite the thing, would it, for him to visit me here and now? I will see him soon though. That should be some comfort.”

“And I also bring word from your sister, Mary.”

At Mary’s name, Anne frowns. “She promised she would be here. You both did. I’m very unhappy with her. It will be some time before she is welcome at the palace.”

“She was … unavoidably detained. She feels it, I assure you. Have you any message for her?”

“Only this: Remember my motto? Grumble all you like, this is how it’s going to be.”

He forces a smile from his already-cracking face. “I will tell her when I see her. I’m sure she will understand. Now, I must take my leave,” he says, hauling himself to his feet. 

“Of course Only do take my message to Henry, about the dress.”

He bows and, as he is backing out of the room, Jane Rochford enters from the chapel. He almost starts at the sight of her.

“Master Cromwell. I thought I heard your voice. Might I follow you out? Converse with you in hushed tones? You always liked that sort of thing.”

“My lady,” he says as she grips his arm. When they are out of earshot of the door: “I am surprised to see you here. From your note I gathered you had had rather enough of the Boleyn family.”

“My note?”

He produces the familiar triangular-shaped note from a pouch he wears at his waist. She takes it and unfolds it.

“This is not my hand.”

“I suspected as much, which is why I did not act on it.”

“What is this business here? This Boleyn family secret?”

“I was hoping you could enlighten me on that point,” he says calmly. “Ah well, perhaps my wife can make sense of it.”

“I heard she was in France.”

“She is abroad for the time being.”

“Have you seen my husband?”

“I have. He is having a bad day, I fear. Have you not--”

“He won’t see me.”

“I think you should insist. He does not have long.”

Her face is unchanged, her clever, black eyes are clear and dry. “I would only torment him.”

 

“ _I_ tormented him, though I did not set out to do so. You will seem a relief.”

“You are trying to be kind, I’m sure,” she says with a mock sweetness in her voice.

“Once Alice More said to me, that when you’ve...been married to a man, you can’t help but worry about him. Wonder if he’s cold.”

“You know all about this. How to behave before an execution. You should write a pamphlet. It will be of use to many of your former friends.”

“Her point was, no matter what a marriage entails for a wife -- and it can be no little horror-- it is still a marriage.” 

Lady Rochford lets out a short, sharp laugh. “Who do you think wrote your note, if it wasn’t me?”

“It hardly matters now.”

“Why did you keep it?”

“I’m not sure. Habit, I suppose. I have only two letters, all that remains of my once voluminous correspondence.”

“Habit is a powerful thing. It is why I am here with her,” she says, nodding in the direction of Anne’s rooms.

“Do you think she’s truly mad?”

“It hardly matters now, but yes.”

“How long?”

“Oh I don’t know. After Henry’s death she made a great show of grief, lost the child as well. We all expected something. We crept around, holding our breath. Even George tread carefully. But she carried on and we thought she was recovering. It was small things at first. She talked about her sister Mary as if she was in France, living with Francis. I suppose that’s where I got it in my head that Mary was in France.”

“She was living in the past?”

“In a way. It was difficult to know when she was and when she wasn’t. Weeks would go by when she was perfectly fine. Then some small thing: she would complain about you as if you were merely late for an appointment. She even brought up Wolsey once as if he were alive.”

“Why in heaven’s name did she leave London?”

“You ask that as if you wanted her to stay! You know very well why. She could not let the Bastard Mary parade around in armour, showing her up.”

“George should not have allowed it.”

“As if George could control her. The surest way to get her to do anything was to have George forbid it. Or her father.”

“Where will you go ...afterward?”

“My father’s house in Norfolk. A widowed daughter, past her prime, with no money. I will be buried alive.”

“You are five years younger than my wife. I’d hardly say past your prime.”

She smiles, shaking her head. “It’s too bad there are not Master Cromwells enough for us all. To rescue all the young-ish widows in England.”

He blushes. “The new queen will need ladies.”

“I should go to her as a spy, perhaps? Tell her all I know of the Boleyn family secrets?”

“You needn’t do that. And you will be a feather in her cap.”

“It would mean living with Jane Seymour again,” she sighs. “Those Seymour brothers are at the heart of this whole rebellion.”

“It’s only a rebellion if you lose.”

“I think I’d rather be buried alive in Norfolk.”

Lady Kingston pokes her head out of the door. “Lady Jane, she is asking for you.”

“Duty calls,” Jane says, rolling her eyes. “I imagine this was the bittersweet ending of so many of your little chats with Mary.”

"Yes," he says and a small laugh escapes before he can stop it. He should walk away. Not get involved any further, but she was once his ally on a hot day in the upper rooms of Westminster Abbey before Anne Boleyn’s actual coronation. 

“Lady Kingston,” he says, “please ask your husband to arrange for Lady Rochford to visit his prisoner.” Jane shoots him a look of pure hatred. He turns away, leaving the Tower by the back stairs, scrupulously avoiding the ghost of Thomas More. 

+++

**February 1539**

The Queen and Lady Sapcote are ushered into Rafe’s sitting room and they all rise. Henry looks nervous, distracted. The boy does not rush to his sister’s side as he used to, but stays near him. Mary sits at last and he follows, lowering himself gently into his chair. He catches Jane Sapcote--Jane Seymour that was--watching him with a look of pity. He feels a sudden annoyance with her and wonders if she has been sent on this visit as a spy for her brothers. 

“You are looking better, Cromwell. Master Sadler hired a competent physician I’m told.”

“I’m a new man, as they say. But surely you don’t come to see me. It is Henry who brings you out, I suspect.”

“Well, I confess we were all astonished at his reappearance. It was almost like a dream.”

“I am sorry I ran away from the battle, m--Your Majesty,” Henry says abruptly. They all turn and look at him. 

“You must not apologize. You are not to blame,” Mary says, smiling. She looks stronger than he’s ever seen her, though she is still frail in body. Her voice is clear and without hesitation. It is a voice born to command. Where was this person three years ago? Lurking, he supposes, biding her time, waiting to come out.

“Lady Sapcote, might I congratulate you on your marriage. You look well,” he says by way of making conversation. 

“Thank you. I have had no opportunity to congratulate you either, Master Cromwell.”

“On my marriage? Why that was years ago now, but no, I suppose we have not seen one another in a long time.”

“Your wife is out of the country?”

“She is abroad, yes. I have often wondered about something your brother said to me once, long ago, when we were playing chess.”

“Oh?”

“He said you wandered about the house talking about ‘Thomas Cromwell’s sleeves’.”

She blushes and laughs. “That. Yes. Well, remember the book of embroidery patterns you so kindly sent me?”

He had nearly forgotten. Once he had thought to woo her with a wholesome gift. He’d given it to Anne. He was never sure if it ever got to Jane. Now it is his turn to blush a little. He glances at Mary, whose attention is riveted on the conversation.

“Oh, yes, I do now that you mention it.”

“You had wrapped the book in the most beautiful blue silk. I made a set of short sleeves out of it. I had intended to wear them at the coronation but I thought better of it in the end…”

“I see. Well, that is that mystery solved then.”

“I think I’ve seen you wear them, Jane,” Mary says with a mischievous smile. “You never said a word about them being Thomas Cromwell’s sleeves.”

“It didn’t seem appropriate. But yes, I confess I do still have them. They are a striking color of blue. I get many compliments on them.”

He remembers the silk. Venetian. He bought it from Margery Vaughn. It was a sample or a remnant probably, but very fine quality, though there was only just enough to wrap a book -- or make a pair of short sleeves. 

“Master Cromwell,” the Queen says, “it has been many months since we have met as well.”

“Nearly three years.”

“You did not come to my coronation.”

“I was unwell. I took a wound at Wellham, if you remember.”

“Yes, I remember. I had hoped you might be better. Might make the effort. Or did you not want to show yourself for fear of one side or the other?”

“I was genuinely ill. For some time. I have only just begun to properly recover.”

“I was told you’ve spent a great deal of the past two years wandering about looking for this one,” she says, nodding to Henry.

“That is true. I would not say wandering. I made a systematic search, fanning out from the area where Henry was last seen.”

The boy looks at him, surprised, perhaps even a bit guilty. Helen sends for a tray of wine and sweet meats. Mary takes a cup, but does not drink. The others don't pick up on the cue. He takes a cup and makes a show of drinking. Helen looks worried. He hopes that she will not send Bill Spiggot in to wrest the cup away from him.

“I had often hoped that you might pay your respects to me,” the Queen says. “I might have had a job for you.”

“Well I made one attempt, but Gardiner sent me on my way.”

“They did not tell me.”

“Did they not? Well, I can’t say I’m too surprised.”

“What did you want?”

“I don’t recall,” he lies. He had been to plead for poor, mad Anne Boleyn’s life. 

“Well, no matter then.”

“What was the job?”

“I think I wanted you to go to Scotland to deal with some crisis on the border. I do not remember the details. There have been so many crises on the Scottish border.”

He is not sorry that he was not sent on another miserable journey to Berwick. Had he done so, of course, he might have regained his position at court. And would have no need to do what he is about to do. “Your Majesty, as you have come all this way, I wonder if I might take the opportunity to ask you a favor?”

“Go ahead.”

“It is for the sake of the boy as well as myself that I ask that my wife be allowed to return to this country.”

“I would oblige you if I could, but I can not assure her safety.”

“Why not? What has she done?” Henry asks. Helen gasps ever so slightly and he shoots the boy a look. 

The Queen carries on in that same regal, steady voice. “Because my allies would not allow it. A queen, I have learned, dear Henry, is not always free to do as she wishes. It was perhaps for the best that Master Cromwell was unable to come to work for me. I should have had a difficult time protecting him.”

“What are you saying?” he, Cromwell, asks.

“I am saying that I would feel more comfortable if you took Henry with you abroad, wherever it is that your wife now lives. I shall miss him, only now just having gotten him back…” Her voice changes, becoming something more human, something like the young woman he knew two years ago. Henry rises and crosses over to her, laying his hand on her arm and leaning his head against hers. 

He knows better than to argue his point further. There was nothing the King could do for the Cardinal. Though he’d said with moist eyes and a most human voice: everyday I miss the Cardinal of York. Just as there is nothing the Queen can do for his wife. She will not spend what goodwill she has among her alliance on the Concubine’s sister. 

“Then we will go. When I am able. You will send for us, when you can. Until then you must fend for yourself.”

“As I have all along.”

He bites his tongue and takes a another sip of wine. 

Mary rises and produces from her purse a gold chain of office. His heart flutters as he recognizes it: the Order of the Garter. “Henry, you must kneel down,” she says, smiling, and like a Knight of the Round Table in their Christmas pageants, Henry kneels on Rafe’s best carpet. Mary takes the chain and places it around his neck. 

Henry says, without looking up, “You’re supposed to anoint me with a sword.”

“I have no sword today.”

Rafe sends round to his study for a sword. Bill Spiggot comes hopping along with it. It is a battered practice sword Rafe keeps for exercise. Mary takes it and lightly taps Henry’s shoulders and the top of his head. “I dub thee Sir Henry, Knight of the Garter,” then adds: “Rise, Sir Henry.”

Henry stands to wild applause. Unable to contain herself, Helen steps forward and hugs the boy. Lady Sapcote kisses him on both cheeks.

“There’ll be no putting up with him after this,” Rafe says, laughing, jovial as bends down to buckle the garter on Henry’s calf. “It might need to be taken in a bit. Until he grows into it.” 

As the Queen prepares to leave, Helen lines up the household outside the sitting room door. He takes the opportunity to say to the Queen, quietly, “One more word. I do not often see my son. But from what I gather, he is in love with you.” 

She turns away, blushing wildly. “Now you will tell me to marry him.”

“I would never presume. You have Gardiner for that. And from what I hear he opposes a foreign match, which is the first sensible thing I’ve heard from Gardiner in a long time. No, I won’t tell you whom to marry. But you could do a great deal worse.”

She looks at him, frowning. "It troubles me that I can grant you no favors, follow none of your council." 

He inhales sharply, bracing himself. 

"What I owe you, sir, is beyond estimation," she says and passes quickly out of the room to her receiving line. He drains his glass and takes another from the tray. He feels a resurfacing of some part of his old self on the wine's warm tide. He begins to calculate routes to the sea, travel times, names of ships, documents of passage, fares, inns and enemies to be avoided between London and Tuscany. She may indeed have found someone new to keep her. She may never forgive him. He may start drinking at an inn and not stop till he's dead. The world will not cease to turn. Meanwhile: he has heard that a bastard was, for a time, Duke of Florence. There is no telling what is in store for the boy, when he grows into that garter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "a bastard has been made..." Allesandro di Medici was ruler of Florence from 1531-1537. He was the son of one of the Medici men (historians differ as to which Medici was his father) and a servant of African descent.


	11. Garden of Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cromwell finds himself in the garden of England and a garden in Italy.

**May 18, 1536**

“Of course she’s far too busy to see you, but if you have a message, I’d be happy to relay it for you,” Stephen Gardiner says, filling the hall with the generous round tones of his voice.

“No, no. Another time,” he says, spotting Jenkins on the lawn through the window. He makes his way outside. The wind and rain have come up. He, Cromwell, waits for Jenkins to finish with his men before drawing him aside to give him the letter. As he’s heading for the gates, Gardiner approaches, calling his name.

“I went down to Putney. Or to be accurate, I sent a man.” 

He stops looks up at the sky, watching the first few drops of rain falling. 

“You’ve killed men.”

“I just fought a war. But you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Jenkins’s men are filing off the green. He squints at them, pretending to be more interested in the military exercise than in the conversation.

“That lad you knifed in Putney died. You did well to run, Cromwell.”

The wind threatens to remove Gardiner’s hat. Gardiner hangs on, shouting, “His family had a noose for you. Your father bought them off.”

“What? Walter? Walter did?” His throat tightens around the words. The noise that comes out is small and feeble.

Gardiner smiles. “Yes. You see. I know things about you don’t know yourself.” 

“I suppose you’ve been to the Queen with your findings.”

“She ought to know what kind of man is her favorite,” Gardiner says, smiling. Once he, Cromwell, casually handed over Gardiner’s house --river frontage, strawberries beds, lock stock and bed posts-- to Anne Boleyn. Now Gardiner is getting his own back. Sometimes that is the way. You come prepared for a knife fight and learn the other fellow has a cannon. It is poor planning, yes. He should have foreseen this. His petition for Anne Boleyn will go unheard. And Mary Tudor will turn to Gardiner for advice, now that Gardiner has given her an easy way to rid herself of her embarrassing connection with the Putney waterfront ruffian. Gardiner is not hated by the Queen’s allies and, as he has shown today, he is no fool. It is exactly what he, Cromwell, would have done, had their places been reversed.

He walks away, not looking back, the rain falling -- as they say in Italy -- from a basin. He pulls himself deeply into his cloak, but the drops slide through and penetrate every part of his dress like invisible knives. He tries to picture the fight, the waterfront. The lad... he can’t remember his face, but he remembers the smell of him: gravy and smoke and sweat. The lad came at him, pushed him into the wall, probably joking, but he’d reacted with the full force of instinct. The knife was out and in the other’s flesh before he could think. Afterward, the lad lingered, the family threatened. He took his three card trick and left the area, working the docks for a time to earn his passage. He’d always assumed the lad had recovered, that it had worked itself out, blown over. It is not until this day that he knows differently.

Back at Rafe’s, he huddles around the fire trying to warm himself, drinking a glass of wine and then another and another to steady his shaking hands. Walter, he thinks, Walter paid them off. Walter, who never gave him anything more than a kick.

+++

At breakfast the next morning he asks again about organizing a search for Henry. They could do a lot with a wagon, a few men. Perhaps print up a pamphlet.

“Could you not ask the Queen for help?”

“She turns me away or Gardiner does. Meanwhile the trail grows colder every day.”

“Perhaps Gregory could get you in to see her.”

“He doesn’t believe Henry is still alive. He thinks I should write his mother. Let her get on with her grief.”

Rafe looks like he agrees with Gregory, saying nothing further about a search party.

That afternoon he gathers his things in a sack and says he’s going for a walk. He has a little cash--the last of his emergency funds. He curses the sums wasted in the siege on a private cook and food tasters, the dice games, the bottles of wine. He wishes he had some of that wine, though.

He calculates the distance to Wellham Green. He will not make it by night fall. There are always extra beds at inns--room in the hay loft, a straw mattress in an unheated outbuilding. There was a time when he kept track of such places. He was much younger then. One looks back on youth, on nights spent in unlocked sheds, with a forgetful, uncritical eye. He remembers being roused at five bells by an irate farmer, being chased out of sleep by bed bugs or drunken bunk mates whose chorus of flatulence and snores were like the mating of frogs in spring. It is fine entertainment to think on these nights while one is sitting before the fire, feet up on a stool with a nice glass of wine. It is quite another to relive them again at fifty, with a newly healed wound.

That night he gets lucky, finds an inn where he’s known and expected to enrich the staff. Rather than disappoint them right away by asking for the cheapest place, he lets them take him up to their best room. He eats, bathes, and goes to bed on clean white goose down, waking at three bells. He lights a candle and begin drafting his pamphlet, a handbill that might help him in his search. 

He leaves what he can, the tuppence on the table, gathers up his sack which he hides under his shirt, and heads out to the jakes. There he changes into his clothes and manages to slip into the inn yard, looking like another worker up for the watch, carrying to and fro before he passes through the gate past the sleeping doorman. 

His name will be dirt here in the morning. It is painful to think of the innkeeper’s wife coming in to wake him for breakfast and finding the tuppence. It can’t be helped. He will find Henry soon. He will get his position back at court, get his wife and daughters back, his house back. Perhaps then he will have time to restore his good name with Innkeepers’ wives.

+++

**November 13, 1536**

Six months come to nothing. A false lead delays him weeks in Knebworth. Another drags him all the way to Norwich. He spends months working his way back south along the coast. There is always the possibility that the boy headed for the coast, thinking of earning his passage to Italy. It’s a long shot but he makes his inquiries in every fishing village and minor port from Norwich to Margate, finding himself in Deal, hungry and cold and looking for a place to sleep. He looks out at the crumbling old sea wall and fortifications, every bit as pock-marked and useless as the walls at Calais. Best not think about that place. About her. About their marriage and children and the days ticking by. Today is his wedding anniversary. He has no paper, no ink to write a letter. Worse: he has nothing to say. 

The wind whips off the wall and straight through his cloak, which has seen better days. His boots, he fears, are not as dry as they once were. It is difficult to tell since he feels damp and clammy all the time. He stops and buys a half pint at a tavern, warms his frozen hams by the fire, studying the notice board. He inquires at the bar about a cheap room. He is to follow a track inland to a clearing. There he will find a small farm and a house and someone willing to give him a bed for the night for tuppence. He makes sure to get the price straight in advance. Since his first lucky night there have been plenty of unlucky ones. Once, at Colchester, an inn keeper threatened him with the law when he was caught sneaking out. He was forced to hand over the full price of his room. Since then he sticks to beds he can actually afford. 

He crosses the commons: even the sheep are hunkered down, blending into the frosty landscape. He picks up the track through the woods and walks quickly, hoping to reach his destination--not knowing exactly how far he has to go--before dark. He has no candles. Can’t afford them and prefers to travel by day anyway. As the last of the light dwindles, he comes into a clearing and sees a small farm before him, just as described: a pig pen, a chicken coop, and a well. There is light in the windows and smoke coming out of the chimney. It is a sight to cheer a weary traveler.

He knocks at the back door and a maid answers. She shows him the box bed in the wall, near the kitchen hearth, almost too good to be true for the price. She eyes him up and down, decides he’s no threat, and offers him some food. “Rabbit stew, the mistress and her young miss have finished with their dinner and there is plenty left in the pot. No one much cares for rabbit now days.” He nods, takes his plate and eats gratefully, trying to place the maid’s accent. 

“Who is the mistress of the house?” he asks idly, between mouthfuls.

She draws herself up and says importantly, “Lady Elizabeth Howard and her niece, Miss Mary Howard.”

He sits there stunned, rabbit stew lodged firmly in his throat. He begins to choke and the maid pounds him on the back and offers him a cup of water.

“You don’t believe me. Most people around here don’t know that their neighbor is mother of a queen, god rest her soul.”

He wonders if this was the maid he hired as a present for Mary’s mother. There were a few Germans in the lot back when he was convinced that he could fix the servant problem at Hever. But they are many miles east of Hever and in such an unprosperous situation, taking in lodgers. He is almost afraid to ask what calamity befell the ladies when the maid, taking his silence for disbelief, explains. “You might well wonder how the mother of a queen wound up here in this no noplace. Her daughter Mary, we do not speak of her, married a traitor, that Cromwell. When the king died, God rest him, Cromwell joined with the king’s daughter, the Bastard Mary.”

“You should be careful who you say these things to, Miss. The new queen might not like such talk.”

“You will inform on me, will you?” She stands looming over him with the wooden stew ladle in hand, poised to kill.

“Of course not,” he says calmly. “I speak only generally. I myself am sympathetic to your plight. I lost my place when the war happened. My master’s household broken up, goods looted, some seized by the Crown. Now please, sit, carry on with your story, Mistress.”

She nods and sits down slowly, not taking her eyes off of him. He carries on eating quietly, formulating a plan for escape while she talks. The usual, he supposes. He’ll keep out of sight until it’s time for bed, then clear off before dawn. Pity. The box bed looks warm and inviting. 

“This Cromwell had spies in our household. He hired me too, but I’m loyal to my mistress and to Miss Mary. But these others were waiting for word from Cromwell. They seized the lot of us and held us hostage. My mistress’s nephew, the Duke of Norfolk, came down to Kent to pay the ransom.”

He remembers the scheme, hastily put-together during the siege. The ransom funded two whole cannon. On balance, not bad for a queen’s mother and niece. Might have turned the tide in their favor, or it might have been one of the guns that caught him in the shoulder. Maybe both.

“The poor duke was killed in battle. He had no sons, so his title was seized by the Bastard Mary. We came west, hoping to find a ship to take us to France. The mistress has friends there. But the mistree has been too ill to make the journey. The worst part, the part which made my mistress fall down with a terrible spell when she heard of it, is that the Bastard Mary plans to give her nephew's title to Cromwell.”

He takes a sip of water to hide his smile. Clearly she has some wrong information. Though, of course, the rumor might be about Gregory. Well, what do you know? A duke! He knew all that expensive education, the jousting armour, the greyhounds couldn’t be for nothing. This calls for a celebration. He is about to ask the maid if there is any wine or beer about the place when the kitchen door swings open.

“Angela! There you are,” Mary Howard says. She has grown since their last meeting at Anne’s coronation, when she was a lively flirtatious girl. She fills in every bit of the matronly black gown she is wearing. Blonde wisps peak out from behind an old-fashioned gable hood. She looks like a young version of his Mary. Very troubling. “I’ve been ringing the bell these five minutes together! What are you up to? Who is this?

“He comes about the bed.”

Mary Howard stares at him and he takes off his hat and stands, looking at the loose stitching in his boot. He has a beard, his hair is long. She probably won’t recognize him. Who was he to her then but her cousin’s old husband, sweating in crimson velvet? And even if she does, what can she do? Even so, his heart is in his throat as he feels her eyes boring into him.

“Name’s Tom Smyth. I’m a blacksmith’s apprentice. Lost my place in the--”

“Yes, yes. I see. If you like, you can have the bed for nothing, providing you get through that lot of wood outside the chicken coop. I need neat kindling and even logs that will fit in the pokey little fire in my aunt’s room. Angela will show you.” He continues to stare at his feet, not daring to look up. “Angela, don’t let this one cheat you!” She turns and is gone. Angela follows her out, letting the door flap in her wake.

He puts on his cloak and steps out the door, flinching at the icy drops -- half snow, half rain -- that sting his face. He looks at the little sheltered area behind the chicken coop. The pile of wood is not very big. He could get through it in an hour or so. It is a long way back into town and there will be no moon. He steps back inside, deposits his cloak on the chair, and lights a lantern with a coal from the fire before braving the icy blast again. Mary Howard did not recognize him and he is unlikely to see his mother-in-law so late in the evening. There will be no finding Henry this year. He must wait for winter to pass and it is a long walk back to Rafe’s house. Weeks at least, perhaps a month. One small miscalculation, a wrong turn, an inn with no affordable place, and he could wind up dead. 

He picks up the ax and holds it up to his light, which wavers in the wind. This will never do. He pokes around in a tool shed and finds a grind stone buried beneath rags and broken tools. He clears away the rubbish, puts on a crusty old apron that hangs from a nail, and sets to work sharpening the ax, watching the sparks fly out in the darkness. 

“Where have you got to, Tom Smyth?” Angela calls from the steps. He moves out of the shed, holds up the ax. 

“Just putting an edge on this.” he says. 

“I will save another plate for you, if you like.”

“Yes. That would be nice,” he says, setting a log on the splitting stump. He pulls off his gloves with his teeth and tucks them in his belt. It has been twenty years since he split a piece of wood, but the memory stays in the body: with a loose but firm grip, let the ax float overhead; spot your mark on the wood and gently guide the ax downward, letting the weight of the maul do the work at first. Then, at the last moment, pull hard and into the wood. The first few blows bounce off the side of the log and he scrambles to reset the wood in the narrow shelter between the chicken coop and the house. He tries again. This time the log flies apart in two even chunks. He smiles. The satisfaction of the bullseye, the hip thrust that sends her over the edge, the nail struck squarely and firmly.

+++

That night in his box bed, behind his curtains, he bunches up his bolster, rolls over onto it, throwing his leg over, pinning it to the bed. He slides his hand under his hip bone. An awkward angle. No slickness, but he holds himself tight, remembering that night on the ship: the heat flowing between them like a coke fire, the rocking of the ship. His hips glide forward, remembering. Does she remember that day? Is she in bed with Frescobaldi, lying awake thinking of me? Does she ever touch herself and think of me?

A noise in the kitchen. He holds still a breathless moment, imagining it must be Angela, come for a midnight cuddle. She is a handsome woman, young and full of life. Who is he to turn her away, and yet he would. At least tonight. He dreads the awkward scene, losing the place so quickly after he’s found it. But the footsteps carry on, through the dark house and up the stairs. What has she got going on up there? 

+++

Six weeks later, it is Christmas and the farmer sits in the Howard ladies’ parlour, his massive snowy boots thawing onto the floorboards that Angela spent the day before scrubbing. She looks disapprovingly through the crack in the kitchen door.

“What is he doing now?” he asks.

“Melting on my clean floor. Sweating on the mistress’s chair.”

He laughs. Poor Angela. A ball of mistletoe hangs over the hearth. He gives her a kiss on the cheek as he’s passing into the parlour. She squeals and punches him, sending him through the door into the room, still rubbing his shoulder. Mary Howard takes the opportunity to get her glass refilled. He goes back though to the kitchen with the empty glasses. 

“She should not throw herself away on the likes of him,” he says. 

“I wish she could go to court, but the Bastard Mary would not allow it.”

“The Bastard Mary would forgive her. It’s not her fault anyway. And look at her. No court in the world would turn her away.”

Angela sighs. “Yah. But she has no money. Court costs money. And who are you, Tom Smyth, that you know so much?”

“No one,” he says. “Do you think the mistress will come down?”

“I hope so. You will help her, yah?”

“Yah.” He has worked out a system for dealing with Elizabeth Howard. She is half blind after some kind of spell. He keeps out of the light, speaks only when spoken to using his Putney accent. She never suspects. Why would she?

The locals come and bring presents to The Wise Woman, as they call her. She cured the innkeeper’s wife’s sore throat, soothed the carpenter’s corns. He remembers her poultice of onion, her bitter tonic of elderflower when he had a cold at Hever. She has taught her niece Mary some of her physic and Mary goes out when babies are on the way. They take chickens and the occasional ham in payment. Word has gotten about that he can put an edge on tools and will do so at more forgiving rates than the blacksmith. He saves his pennies under the mattress of the box bed.

+++

The day after Epiphany he tramps into Deal with a headache. He looks for the cure in his weekly pint at the inn. On the way home, he stops at the cobbler’s shop to pick up some shears that he promised to sharpen.

“Been meaning to ask you about those boots, Tom.”

“What about them?”

“Where’d you get them?”

“My old master gave them to me. An old pair of his.”

“Come now. Don’t kid me. I know a custom last when I see one.”

“I suppose they were custom. I was lucky we were the same size.”

The cobbler grunts doubtfully. “You’ve got a blown stitch. Take that boot off and I’ll see what I can do with it.”

“I’ve no other shoes.”

“I know you have no other shoes, you turnip. You stand here and I’ll see what I can do.”

He stands on one foot and, bouncing, works the boot off as best he can.

“You’ve singed this on the fire, haven’t you?”

“I suppose. I do like to put my feet up.”

“The ruin of many a fine pair of boots, that sort of thing. The leather is sound. Just a bit swollen.” He works some fat into the toe of the boot. “Italian leather, I’d wager.”

“My master only bought the best.”

“Who was this generous master?”

“I don’t like to say. These are unsafe times to choose any particular side.”

“Most mysterious.”

“Is it? I’m sorry. It’s nothing really. I'll tell you some time over a pint. Do you need to patch it?”

“Patch it!? I wouldn’t dare. Be like cutting off a functioning limb. There’s not a piece of leather in Deal to compare to this.”

“Alright, do what you can.” He eyes a rack of leather goods the cobbler has for sale.

“If you see anything you like, just say.”

“These leather hose. I could use them in the shop. I’ve always wanted a pair.”

“They’d be good protection. You are lucky the blacksmith in Deal is too big for them. I make his aprons by stitching two together.”

“How much?”

“How about you sharpen this lot of tools and we’ll call it even.”

“Done” he says, smiling. Headache gone, he walks back to the farm in his as-new boots and leather hose. The cobbler warned him if he burned his boots again, he could find someone else to fix them. In the old days he would never have taken such abuse from a tradesman, but he likes the old man. There is something of Walter in him.

+++

The snow melts. The birds come back. On a warm day in March he starts putting the mistress’s herb garden to rights, pruning back the dead, thinning the overgrown beds. He bends down to knock some dirt off of a root ball when a large, black shadow falls across the ground in front of him.

“You there. Tom Smyth,” says Willy Bland, the blacksmith’s boy, sixteen years old and as many stone, mashing his massive, swollen fist into a meaty paw.

“What can I do for you?” he says, straightening and stepping forward, looking up into the eye of the enormous boy.

“You can get the hell out of Deal. Else quit knicking our trade,” Willy says and pushes him back, sending him tripping over his own shovel. He gets up quickly, annoyed with himself for not seeing that coming. Grabbing a pitchfork that is stuck in the ground nearby, he threatens the boy with the points.

Bland shouts threats, but turns and runs off when Angela comes out into the yard with her ladle. 

“My preserver,” he says, dropping the pitchfork, brushing the dirt from his knees.

“Look at the state of you,” she scolds. “Come inside and have a drink of mead.”

He sits in the kitchen with his feet on a stool, sipping his drink, contemplating his situation as Angela chatters about last year's mead and this year's cider.

Though there was no real harm done, Willy Bland makes him realize that it is time he, Cromwell, got on with his search. He’s saved a little money over the winter. That night, he lies in the box bed waiting to hear Angela’s tread on the stair above him, the faint creak of Mary Howard’s door, before getting up and dressing. Using a piece of towel, he makes a bundle with some cheese and bread and a fat slice of ham. He takes a few candles and fills a flask from a jug of Angela’s mead. 

+++

**July 1538**

His old gamekeeper has let his falcons go free, but they hang about Great Place, feeding on mice in the orchard. He watches them from his perch in the ruined garden of his Stepney House. He sits on the stump of the great oak that was struck by lightning the summer after they were married. They’d gotten caught in the rain, the night of the lightning. She’d shed her wet heavy clothes leaving pools around the house for Adelle to mop up. They’d stripped down to their shirts, opened the windows in the bedroom, and bathed in the torrent that fell from a broken rain gutter. More wet clothes to leave tide marks on the floor. They'd dried themselves with a linen sheet, before falling into bed. A night to get child if they hadn’t already had one on the way. He’d had the remains of the oak made into a table for Austin Friars.

An old place like this needs a lot of repairs. Though she’d opposed it for sentimental reasons, he did have the gutter fixed in the fall. A thing like that could ruin the foundation. One of his falcons lands in the shade near his feet. Does she know him, he wonders? Is it Anne or Grace? He used to know the difference.

At St. Dunstan's, across the road, he earns a few coins in exchange for cleaning up the rubbish left behind in the church yard after a wedding. Walter used to keep an image of Dunstan, a silver smith said to have caught the devil by the nose with his tongs. He, Cromwell, takes a break in the cool of the sanctuary, says hello to the tomb of Sir Henry from whom he leased Great Place, using his sleeve to polish the wooden railing around the man’s coffin. 

+++

**October 1538**

He walks through the gates at Austin Friars. No lock remains, just a piece of rope tied through the bars to keep them from swinging in the wind. He inspects the garden. Some of the fruit trees he planted are starting to bear. The apples are mostly done, but there are a few green pears on the vine. He will try to get them before the frost or the birds do.

Inside the house--the door has been taken off its hinges and leans against the frame--birds flap about in the afternoon shadows. He has come with the intention of finding something overlooked by looters, to check his secret panels and hiding holes, to gather up enough things to sell to carry on with his search. Get another pamphlet printed up. He looks in the library and is startled by another person. The man introduces himself as Lionel, King of the Squatters. “I’m Tom. Just Old Tom. I used to work in the kitchens,” he says. Lionel offers him a drink from the jug of wine he has found in the cellar. It has perhaps seen better days, but then again, who hasn’t?

+++

**Part II: May 1539**

She paces the garden at dusk, her three turns after dinner, children in bed, the only sound the light crunch of her foot on the gravel and the night birds stirring in the trees. She stands for a time watching the sun bleeding into the line of hills on the horizon before edging closer to the wall to get a better look at the road down below: puffs of dust rising above the grape vines, the telltale signs of a pair of travelers on foot. She listens, straining, but can’t make out the voices. Anyway, they are not who she is expecting. They will come on horseback.

Idly strolling, she makes her way slowly through the herb beds, stopping to pluck a piece of sage which she rubs on the back of her hand, breathing in the scent. This will be her third summer in Tuscany, but she must not think of it like that, must not see the days stacked up behind her threatening to topple or stretched out before her in an endless line. Cling to routine, the book of hours: waking every morning to the sound of Frescobaldi’s dovecote, bathing, dressing, seeing to the girls, saying her prayers, breakfast, writing letters (most never sent, she has sheaves of scratchings in a clutch in her drawer), waiting for letters! Sometimes she receives the odd line from Adelle in France (Adelle’s writing is quite poor but enthusiastic). Tutors, lessons, French, music, taking the girls into town or visiting neighbors or on an outing with Catherine’s intended, home at dinner, Frescobaldi decked out heavily, sweating, his new bride, their tight-lipped conversations, more music, prayers, getting the children to bed, and, finally, ending with this most-treasured and feared time of day. Free from the motion of routine, the mind clings to her lost husband and child or -- more happily in these last weeks -- to counting the days since her letter went out and anticipating its reply; to pretending not to watch out for them.

She stops at the far end of the garden where the tall trees of the forest loom overhead and the damp smell of moss hangs in the air. There is a narrow set of stone steps cut into the wall, leading up into the forest above. She looks back at the house and up at her bedroom window, from which she can also see the stone steps. They frighten her: some day she is sure she will go up them and not return. 

She is startled by a noise at the far end of the garden: voices, a pair, talking in low tones. She creeps toward them, wondering if she should run into the kitchen and alert Frescobaldi’s men who are just inside the door. It is probably only the tramps who sometimes come up from the road to ask directions and beg a few scraps from the kitchen. She studies them in the fading light. They are both of middle height, an inch or two taller than herself, though one looks to have a powerful build beneath all his layers of wool and fur. Or perhaps he is all layers? He wears leather hose like a guide in the mountains and his head is bare, long black hair streaked with gray and a beard that is colored likewise. His companion is a young man with a shock of bright red hair protruding from under his cap. His long legs seem to belong to a different person altogether, such is the awkward way he has of moving, as if he is made up of parts from a boy and parts from a man. 

“Mary?” a voice escapes from behind the grizzled beard. 

She puts a hand to her mouth. “My God. Thomas.”

The young man--her Henry--springs forward and embraces her. She breathes in his scent, the sourness of the road, the spring herbs and underneath -- somehow -- the sweet smell of the infant. She knocks away his cap, crying: his hair has changed color! How tall he is! When he left, he ended somewhere below her breast; she remembers bending over to embrace him on that January morning, the way he groused and fidgeted and couldn’t wait to be free of her. Now she can put her head on his shoulder and she does,, crying, holding him tighter and tighter and he does not seem to wish to be free but holds on too. At last she looks up at at her husband who is still standing back by the wall with the sun behind him, his face in shadow. He must be afraid, as well he should be, for he has done much wrong to keep them apart, even if it is not all his fault. 

“I don’t understand. Where are your horses?”

“Tom didn’t want to bother with them. Walking is cheaper and I am used to it. And he says exercise does me good.”

“Oh he does, does he? Does Tom say that?” she teases. “But what a pair you are! I took you for intruders, nearly called the guards,” she says and hugs the boy again, laughing.

“Oh we intended that. We wanted to look like bandits. Like pirates. That was what we were going for.” She laughs, shaking him gently by the shoulders. He puts his arm around her and walks her around the garden. “And we have been at sea so long we practically are pirates. The boat across the channel was ever so slow and we had a storm and Tom was miserable sick, but I was not because I kept to the deck even though the sailors told me to get below decks or risk going over the rails. Oh, but don’t look so, mother, I was safe. Never any danger. They only said that because they liked to tease me. And then we landed and changed ships and went round Portugal and Tom bought a flagon of wine, and then we went around Spain which was grand and Tom bought another flagon of wine, and then we changed ships at Barcelona and went on to Marseilles and I ate a lobster and we landed at-- Where was it, Tom?”

“Livorno.”

“Right, Livorno. And we walked here from there and it was lovely, though sometimes quite hot, and Tom got miserable sunburned because he has stopped wearing a hat, which I think is silly, but he will tell you some nonsense about wanting his head to breathe.” She shakes her head, half-comprehending, looking from one to the other. He is watching her still from his spot near the wall. She can’t see his expression but she feels it, sees the tension in the outline of his body.

“Henry, I know you have walked far, but will you do me a favor and walk a few more steps?” He nods. “Go inside and tell Bruno in the kitchen that Thomas Cromwell has arrived. They will make you some supper. You must be exhausted, famished.”

“I am!” Henry says and crosses to the house in a couple of bounding steps.

“By God, I thought you were a...I don’t know what.” Demon is the word that comes into her head, but that is not quite right. “For a moment. I see now that it is you.” He approaches slowly, never taking his eyes off her as if he is waiting for her to pull a knife. She reaches out for his gloved hand and holds it in her own, bringing it to her cheek, resting against the cool black leather. “What took you so long, my love?”

“Bad luck,” he says quietly.

“You can tell me all about it later,” she says, studying his lean face, the red skin beneath the beard, the green eyes flashing out like a snake in the darkening garden. “Are you tired? Hungry?”

“Tired, yes. Thirsty, definitely. Hungry, no.”

“You must not be my husband, after all,” she jokes and he smiles, but she sees that he is much thinner and there is something lacking in him somewhere: appetite. In her memory he is always eating, always secreting away food, always feeding, providing, provisioning. She liked best to remember him as he was when she first met him, when she admired his spirited conversation with her sister and his gray velvet doublet. He is sometimes in her mind a collection of lines, the beloved wrinkles around his eyes, the outline of his shoulder in the dark of their bed, the curve of his belly beneath her hand. This is not the same man and yet it is, though the lines have regrouped into the jut of his cheekbone, the hollow of his neck, the ripples in the leather as it clings to his thigh. Still the same green eyes, though: glittering, questioning, observing everything. A painter’s eye or, worse yet, an accountant’s. Nothing lost or missed; even the things he does not understand are seen and remembered in that brain of his, that relentless lawyer’s brain. 

She drops his hand, takes a step forward, looking at him, waiting for him to close the gap between them. He was always slow at this bit. Like the signal got lost in a fog. At last he reaches out, puts his arms around her, pulls her close by her shoulders until she tucks up against him. She has gained padding where he has lost but there is at last the longed-for connection: the heat flows between them, his breath on her neck. She closes her eyes in anticipation of his kiss. It comes at length: he takes her face in his hands, she feels the cool of the leather on her cheeks once more. His mouth is dry at first, the kiss gentle, then suddenly a bite to her lower lip and she can hold back no longer, responding fiercely, her tongue plunging into his mouth, and at the same moment a plunging of her stomach into an abyss, a clenching she feels everywhere, a fleeting memory of fucking that is almost to be dreaded but then missed as soon as it is passed. She reaches up, one hand into his hair, tangling in the curls, searching out the curve of his skull with the palm of her hand. The other hand holds onto that shoulder which feels different beneath the layers of clothing, a tense pack of muscle where once was a kind of softness, almost cushioning. Her hand drifts slowly down his back until it reaches the cool leather gathered on his backside. That is something new to be savored and explored, but the kiss is ended when lamps appear at the kitchen door, Bruno coming to bring Master Cromwell, Thomaso, to supper. There is noise deep within the house as the Frescobaldis, master and mistress, are told the news: Thomas Cromwell has arrived. He is in the garden, kissing his wife.

+++

After Frescobaldi has been roused, Thomaso and Mistress Frescobaldi are introduced. Clearly unimpressed, she goes back to her rooms, and after the girls are got up and their curiosity slaked, and they are all embraced and the difference in their heights is remarked upon; after Hope has taken him by the hand and led him on a lengthy tour of her portion of their shared room; after Henry has been covered in kisses by all his sisters; after the girls have been sent back to bed, half-rioting in protest; after Henry has been found a place to sleep in the bed that Christophe used to use; after they have been fed and he has had a glass of wine or two and has eaten some meat and cheese and had a basin of soapy water to wash with -- after all of this, they sit in her room looking quietly at one another in the glow of the firelight, waiting for the other to speak.

“The new mistress of the house seems nice,” he says, taking a sip of wine.

She suppresses a tiny dry cough, trying to think of something diplomatic to say.

“What?”

“Seems is a good word for it.”

“It can’t be easy being a guest in another woman’s home. I am sorry that you’ve been left here so long. When did it happen?”

“The wedding was at Michaelmas last. It had been brewing for a while.”

“Why don’t you like her?” he says, tossing a stem from his wine into the fire. 

“I do. They are ill-matched, that is all. He's too old for her and she treats him badly because she is unhappy.”

“Perhaps you want to trade places with her?”

“Perhaps you want a punch in the nose,” she says with a half smile. Here it comes. The interrogation. Sooner than she’d have imagined. Oh why must he ruin things with that lawyer’s brain?

“Alright,” he says, laughing. “It was just a joke.”

“It damn well had better be.” It comes out more forcefully than she would like. 

“I am relieved for your sake that he took a new wife.”

“Why?” 

“It must have taken some of the burden off of you.”

“What burden?” She can feel herself drifting toward anger, spoiling the occasion. She wishes she could stop herself. 

“Keeping Frescobaldi happy.” And there it is. Cards on the table.

“Goddamn it. I knew it!”

“What?”

“You’re jealous! Goddamn it, you are so predictable.”

“I’m not jealous. But we were apart a long time.”

“So it follows that there must have been some pressure, some temptation? Take care, Thomas. You will reveal your own failings. I don’t want to hear about them just yet,” she says, looking into her glass, swirling the dregs around, gazing into the patterns on the sides as if she’d never seen them before, when the truth is she is so familiar with the appearance of every part of her world that a new tactile sensation, a scratched goblet or a chipped glass, would be a blessed relief to her.

“You will find them out eventually. I owe you that much truth.” Oh God. She had said that to goad him, but there _was_ something beneath it and that raw fact burns in her head. She looks into his eyes: they are slightly pink about the edges. From Henry’s tale, it seems as if he was drunk half the journey. God knows what he’s been up to these years. 

“You don’t understand, do you? I don’t care,” she says at last. It is a lie, but she has never been able to abide the horrible competitions, the fights with other women, the things men put you up to if they can. If she is jealous, she will die before she shows it to him. “I never have. So Johane nursed you back to health. Yes, Henry told me that in his note. I can imagine. Your hand slipped. Jane Seymour came to see you when you were ill. Henry told me that too. Hand slipped again. However many times your hand slipped in three years, I don’t care.”

“You don’t understand--”

“I understand enough, believe me. I know what allowed that lawyer’s brain of yours to justify it. You convinced yourself that I was already practically Frescobaldi’s wife. He was keeping me. I saw it in your face as you watched me with him just now. God’s blood, the relief. The first time I met him, when he was just your poor old friend in straights, brought home for supper, the jealousy was all over you then because I was kind to an old man. I knew you were truly desperate --in the worst trouble-- or you would not have sent me here to live with him. You had no other choice.”

“You were more than kind. Flirtatious, I’d say…”

“Sometimes that is how one is kind. He understood. Why can’t you?”

“I understand that you have always been exceptionally good at games. You buried me long ago at chess.”

“This is nothing like that. This is just the way one is in a civilized world. Some people are kind and expect nothing in return but a smile and a laugh for their jokes. Others expect more. I have had to learn the difference. To rely on my instincts to tell me which sort of man I am dealing with.”

“And what sort of man am I?” he asks softly, as if he is afraid of the answer. And at that she softens a bit, looks at him, not with pity but with just a fraction of her overflowing heart.

“The kindest and the best. You have spent three years tramping the countryside to find a boy who is not even yours. You have obviously endured every imaginable hardship and deprivation. Believe me, I’m not ungrateful--”

“You must not think…”

“No. You will let me speak, Thomas. I have a drawer full of unsent letters which I will now burn because I’m going to spare you the details of three years alone, shut up here, smiling until I thought my face would break. I spent a thousand days trying not to think about you, Thomas, praying for God to return you to me, but a couple moments every day, every evening, I was free to walk in the garden. And the garden filled sometimes with monsters. Not with gorgons and mermaids and giants, but with these thoughts. The things I know in my heart. I know you, Thomas. That is my curse.” 

“Will you ever forgive me?” He looks like he already knows the answer.

“There is nothing to forgive, Thomas. You made a mistake. You were foolish. You have been hiding from admitting that for three years. You have punished us both because you were too proud to admit that you made a terrific, fucking mess of things. You should have hied up and headed for the nearest port with Diego and Javier. You should have brought my son back to me, rather than risk him on some foolish errand for a dead man. I will not ask how your errand turned out. I know. She is queen and she has forgotten her preserver already. Just as Henry would have eventually. That is what they do, the Tudors. They take and take until there is nothing left and then they get rid of you. Discarded. Thrown out like the rushes after dinner.” 

“Separation changes people.” He is back to looking afraid again.

“Does it? Physically perhaps, yes. But does it change them...to use your word, in essentials? Have you forgotten that you loved me because we were a thousand days apart?”

“It is far more than a thousand days. 1,215 to be exact.”

“Have you been keeping track or did you calculate that just now?”

“Keeping track?”

“Really?”

“No.”

“You have an abacus in your head, Thomas Cromwell.”

“I know.”

“It doesn’t leave room for much else.”

He laughs. “I’ve missed you. So much. More than you could know.” He is looking into the fire. He is too far away. Why can’t he look at her?

“I think I know. I might be at least allowed to share in the knowing.” Again she feels herself annoyed when she doesn’t want to be. Perhaps that is his strategy: provocation for the purposes of manipulation. Well, two can play. She reaches up and undoes her hood, letting her hair fall free, watching the effect it has on him. Nothing visible. He pours another glass of wine. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“What?” he asks, looking up from the decanter.

“Did you forget that you loved me in one-thousand, two hundred and fifteen goddamn days?”

“I did not. Not ever. Not once. For one second.”

“I believe you.” 

“For God’s sake, why?” He sets the glass down without taking a sip.

“Because I know you. And because I did not forget either. Ever. Not once. For one second,” she says. 

He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. She brings herself forward to meet him, taking his bare hands in hers, turning them over, kissing them, studying them: the palms are a mass of calluses, so that they are rough like sandy stone. There is a new knotted scar below the base of his thumb. She rubs her hand over his bad knuckle. It has always reminded her of a wounded tree, more a feature than an imperfection. 

“What’s this?” she asks, caressing the scar with her thumb.

“Just a sliver.”

“I thought you were wounded in the war?”

“I was,” he says, pointing to his shoulder, “here.” 

She crosses the space between them and sits down on his lap. He leans back in the chair, looking up at her, smiling. Bending low, she kisses him. He tastes of wine. She runs her fingers through his beard, feeling the softening of his jawline beneath the wiry hair, then across the ridge of scar on his head under the mad tangle of hair.

“What is this nonsense about not wearing a hat?”

“Oh nothing. I lost a number of hats in my travels and eventually I just got used to being without one. I quite like it.”

He does look like a pirate -- or a demon, she thinks. Whoever he is, it is nice to be back in his lap with his arms wrapped around her, strong arms with cables of new muscles drawn taught below his elbows.

“What have you been doing with yourself, Thomas? You look like a laborer.”

“That’s just it,” he says, drawing himself up slightly as if he’s stung by her question. “I have been laboring: blacksmithing, odd jobs, chopped a mountain of wood.” 

“You poor thing.”

“Don’t,” he pulls away, annoyed. “Don’t do that. I’m alright. I was happiest working like that. It made the time go.”

“I’m sorry, love. Don’t mind me. I’m just jealous. I had nothing to keep my mind so happily occupied.”

He turns back, nodding, taking her face gently in his rough hands, kissing her. She reaches her hand under his doublet, under his shirt, seeking out his bare chest. She feels the hair tickling her palms, moves across to the new wound gently, studying it with her hand. 

“Do you want to call Adelle, to help you get ready for bed?” he asks in a low voice.

“Adelle is in France. With Christophe.”

“What are they doing there?”

“Starting a family. Christophe has a good place. Adelle has quit working. Didn’t I tell you?”

He shakes his head, smiling. 

“I gave them a wedding present. I hope you don’t mind.”

“What sort of present?”

“One of my rubies. They sold it and bought a house. Can you imagine? A whole house for one little rock.”

“One of your what?”

And then she realizes he has no idea about her fortune. What she came away with. The day she sewed the best jewels from one of the great chests in Austin Friars into the lining of her cape. She gets up and pads across to her drawer. Reaches into the back, behind the clutch of unsent letters, and finds the velvet bag. 

“Put out your hands,” she orders and he puts them out, cupping them slightly as if he is going to drink from a well. She dumps the contents of the bag into his hands. The stones make a satisfying click as they tumble into his palms. 

He looks dumbfounded. He pushes them about in his hand and then pours them back into the bag. “You realize what this means? We can set up house, right away. Send Henry to school.” She nods, smiling. 

“Yes, love.”

“Didn’t you offer to pay some to Frescobaldi?”

“I tried many times, but he always refused. Said I should keep it for another time.”

He laughs. “My luck is changing.”

“I hope so.” She puts the bag back in the drawer, walks back to where he is sitting, plays idly with his hair. They will need two barbers. One for the beard and one to get through this thicket, it is so tangled and grown together.

“Well if there is no Adelle, than I shall have to help you get ready for bed myself,” he says, reaching up, taking her hand away from his hair, bringing it to his lips.

“Oh, go on then,” she says and turns around so he can undo her laces. He stands behind her and she can feel his warm breath on her neck, feel the powerful fingers on her lower back, squeezing her waist, pulling the laces. She rocks on her heels slightly as he unties her bodice, falling into him so that she can feel the jut of his cock against her backside. He puts one arm around her waist and the other across her body, resting his hand down the front of her shirt, kneading her breast. “You’re supposed to be helping me undress,” she says, but lets her breathing get ragged and loud as he bites her neck and shoulder lightly. He withdraws his hands and she feels bereft, annoyed with herself. Why not let him do what he likes?

She turns around to face him and he is so intent on his job, opening the tiny bows that hold her sleeves, pulling out pins like an expert and catching the sleeves and folding them before they drop to the floor. He gently tugs at the bodice until it comes free and sets it on top of the sleeves. He unties her skirt and that drops to the ground and she steps out of it, picking it up as he begins undressing himself much less methodically, more desperately tugging at his doublet. 

“What are these things?” she says, indicating his hose.

“They are the latest in blacksmith gear.”

She laughs. “I don’t believe it. I thought you were a man of the Alps, a wanderer, a mountain climber.” 

He is free of his doublet and is struggling to get his boots off.

“Sit,” she orders and he sits on the end of the bed. He extends his foot so she can pull his boot off. He blushes, probably thinking of the night before the duel when she helped him off with his boots. She takes the first boot off quickly, then reaches up and feels the calf of his other leg, smoothing her hand across the leather as it clings to the muscle there, a firm, shapely curve, turned like a new piece of furniture. It is gratuitous, of course: she needs only to grab the heel to pull off the boot which she could do in a moment and be done, but he seems to be enjoying sitting over her, looking down her shirt, and she likes holding him there, touching him, prolonging things. After such a long time, it is the best way. He has waited three years, he can wait three more minutes. She reaches further up his leg, gripping his thigh, and he jumps a little and there is a hitch in his breathing in case she should wonder if this affects him the way it would her. Sometimes she thinks men have just the one place where they want to be touched, and because of that they never understand how many fields lie fallow on a woman’s body. You can direct them, move their big rough hands about, tell them even, but it doesn’t seem to stick and you have to remind them afresh every time. Oh, they seem to get breasts and thighs and cunt alright, but have they considered the palm of the hand or that tender bit behind the knee. Of course Thomas Cromwell knows about the knee. He is one in a million for understanding the knee. That and other things. 

He leans back, shifting his hips as if he were mildly uncomfortable: good. “Sit tight, my love. I’ll have this off soon enough.” She removes the boot and sets it next to the other in a neat row and returns her attention to him, making a study of his hose. The leather reveals the shape of him, stiff, ready to spring out even, but she can’t figure out how to get in there. These really are the strangest things. 

“What is it?” he asks, sounding anxious. 

“Nothing, just... Thomas, where is your codpiece?”

“Oh that. Yes, the opening is on the side.”

She watches, fascinated, as he shifts his weight onto one hip, undoing a set of laces. Whoever designed these was not thinking of this moment in a man’s life. Nor even of his convenience in the jakes. He lifts up his hips to be helpful and she slides the hose off, doing her best not to pull him off the bed along with the hose, which don’t give way easily. The force required to remove the hose sends her tumbling backward off her heels and onto her backside. She has imagined this scene in her mind a hundred times. It never went like this. He leans forward, concerned, trying to hide a smile. There are some obvious choices to be made here with her kneeling beneath his naked legs, his cock waving out at her like a maypole. And while she is in the mood to be generous, perhaps it is better left to another time. Still, it will not hurt to give the suggestion of it, just to rile him. She gets to her knees and pushes herself forward onto his legs, taking in his tangy, leathery scent, letting her hair brush across his thighs. She grasps the tip of his cock and pulls back the hood with one hand, grabbing him at the root with the other, and his breath, faster and louder yet, spurs her on. She exhales on him, teasing him with her breath; slowly opens her mouth, wider then wider still. She looks up at him and his eyes are turned away, his face twisted as if in pain. Too much, too soon. She releases him and climbs up onto the bed. He looks at her relieved. 

“I didn’t have the strength to refuse you,” he says, his voice an airy growl in her ear. He rolls over and puts his hand --that sandy roughness--on her breast. Every part of her is aching and on fire. It is almost painful, like the nights she tried and tried to conjure him until her fingers were pruned with her own juices and nothing ever worked for long. 

She pulls her shirt off and he watches her before removing his own. She is not shy, of course, but he is so different and it has been so long that it feels a little bit like the first time. Then again it was dark the first time and neither of them saw anything of the other but what their fingers told in the dark. She crawls over to him as he sits propped against the pillows and lies down on his chest, and lying like that - breast to breast - feeling a wave of sweetness flow between them, she begins to kiss him: a lot of deliberate and exploratory kisses, some playful and silly, others long and deep until they both stop touching one another and just lie there kissing. This reverse progress doesn’t last long and he rolls over, putting his leg over her, and again the bare flesh on flesh, his thigh on hers, is conduit to more heat and something else, a song of the body. He is on top now and the blessed weight of him, the longed-for-in-the-dark weight of his body, is there. At last. And he has found her knee, and he weighs it in his hand before gently prising it to one side. She reaches up and, starting with his shoulders, begins a thorough investigation of his woodchopping back and his laborer’s arms. He thought she was insulting him! Men can be so stupid sometimes, she thinks, smiling to herself, pressing the palms of her hands into his hip bones, letting her fingers settle on his backside.

And after their mouths have given their greetings, and their thighs communicated, and they’ve been stuck together as one so that she can feel his heartbeat in her own breast, and after his thumbs have greeted the backs of her knees and there is a great deal of maneuvering his hands around inside her (they really do forget!) and a lot of oaths, some of them deliberate, designed to rile him (God’s blood and fuck me now) and others that just came out of nowhere (wounds!), and after she has pushed him two or three times to the brink with her own hands (which she notes, with some truculent pride, require absolutely no re-education), he eases inside her and there’s a moment of reacquaintance with him, which is delightfully painful but passes quickly as she relaxes. It’s almost too bad, really, for his sake, because this is a man who has compared his member to the leviathan. And she would like so much just once to swoon in its presence. 

+++

_She wakes and rises, standing naked in the moonlight. The bed is empty behind her. The garden steps gleam in the dark, calling. She pulls on a shirt and a cloak and a pair of shoes and creeps down through the dark house, past the sleeping children and her snoring hosts. The air is chill in the garden and she can see her breath, rising up to the moon. She mounts the stairs and follows the path into the woods to a clearing. Her heart stops at the figure before her, a stranger, and yet something about his outline is familiar. He spreads his cape on the ground, silently in the moonlight, and she lies down and waits, and though she is sure she will wind up as the object in some morality tale, she reaches up and pulls back the tangle of hair and turns his face to the moonlight. Familiar green eyes look back at her. It is him, of course, of course it is him. The steps frightened her because she was afraid she would use them to run away. She did not realize they needed to be there to let him back into the garden._

+++

The sound of Frescobaldi’s doves wake her while the sky is still gray with a smudge of pink. Those damn doves. Every day. She’s had a dream.Tries to remember it before it gets lost. It was unsettling, but there is something more, a good thing. There is a brown shape, indistinct in the corner. Her eyes slowly adjust to the light and she realizes: his boots. He is here. It is all real. His boots on her floor. Her eyes burn with tears of joy. She rolls over, putting her arm across him, pulling him near. He grumbles. It sounds like he says, “Lovely.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Lynne for all her work on this punctuation disaster, for all her last minute help, and late night help and the suggestion to write some of it from Mary's POV. Also: when will I learn that "till" is not really a word?


	12. The Living Frieze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cromwell returns home for the Coronation of Elizabeth I. Will her remain to serve her?

**January 12, 1559**

There are three wagon loads of Cromwells coming up from Dover, tip toeing past Hever, taking the entire upper floor of an inn: ten family members, not including servants. Catherine and her Giuseppi and their brood (six in all), he and Mary and Hope and Jane. Mary’s grandson, Marco, sits next to him at dinner and points to things and he, Cromwell, teaches the boy the English words for them. 

His wounds ache to be back home in the rain and cold. Welcome home, Thomas, the weather itself seems to say. That night he sits close to the fire in his room in the inn and remembers arranging a wedding for the King of England and Anne Boleyn, possibly already carrying the baby, now grown and about to be crowned queen in a few days. She is only a few months older than his Hope. He thinks of them twinned like that, always his Hope and Elizabeth, cousins. Hope will be in the royal procession with her mother, sister, and cousin Mary Howard. He plans to sit quietly in the back of the cathedral with the children and Giuseppe. He can be of some use that way. 

+++

Gregory and Henry ride down to meet them at Maidstone. They are all to stay with Richard’s friend Anthony St. Leger. Mary Tudor gave Leeds Castle to Anthony in return for his service in Ireland. Richard has had no such reward, though he has the wounds to show he has been more often in Ireland than Anthony. They make their progress into the castle grounds, see Richard standing with Gregory and Henry. Catherine’s children hang out of their wagon as they go over the drawbridge onto the small island in a lake upon which the castle sits. They are excited to see a “real castle.” All the fortifications they see in Italy are actual military installations with guns and modern soldiers, not picture book places peopled by ghosts.

He gets a quick “Tom!” and a hug before Henry is whisked off by his mother to introduce him to Catherine’s children. He, Cromwell, is left standing with his son, noticing the strands of coarse gray hairs in Gregory’s beard. It is a shock, of course, to realize that his son is 40. The same age he was when he started working for the Cardinal. They have not seen one another in twenty years and their letters have been sparse. Gregory never was much of a correspondent. 

His son has an entourage of guards in matching livery who follow him about, call him “Your Lordship.” 

“I am sorry for your loss,” he says, indicating the arm band his son wears.

“It is a loss for the country.” 

He nods. He has spent the years since Mary Tudor’s Spanish marriage, arranging visas and shelter for his Bible reading friends fleeing her rule. He once had a barn full of Anabaptists. They were a nice lot. Worked to earn their keep. The men made toys and furniture and the girls sewed clothes. Ugly, ill-fitting clothes, but you can’t remake the world over night; can’t give people talent they don’t already possess at birth.

“I’m sorry I missed you at Dover. I was detained. There was a lot of business to attend after the funeral.”

“Of course. I understand.”

“You of all people, I suppose, really do understand.”

“Well, you are here now. That’s the important thing.” 

For a moment it seems they might embrace, but it passes and they breathe tentatively until Gregory is brought over to meet more relatives. Mary says, cheerfully, teasingly, “When are you going to give your father a grandson?” and Gregory looks embarrassed. He, Cromwell, takes little Marco’s hand and says he has plenty of grandchildren already.

+++

After dinner he and Gregory are left alone together again to drink wine (though he only takes a small glass, and more water than wine) and enjoy Anthony St. Leger’s library. 

“Why didn’t you come back?” Gregory asks.

“I’m here now.”

“She would have forgiven you. And your wife.”

“You don’t know that. Anyway, I had planned to. It just never worked out. And when your hopes were finally spoiled, I thought it was best to leave it alone.”

“My hopes?”

“Of marrying her.”

“She was never going to, you know. She just kept me around to threaten the other suitors. I was a...a tool for her.”

“You served her then. You should be proud.”

“I have accomplished nothing.”

“You have stayed alive in court for twenty years. That’s more than I could ever say. You have followed in my footsteps, you have bested me.”

“I spent the whole time standing around, waiting for her to make up her mind.”

He laughs. “That is a courtier’s life. You’ve been a good Duke. You’ve taken the Scottish situation in hand as I never could. When we passed through Calais, I was pleased to see that you have seen to the fortifications there as I recommended. How many places around home are safer because of you?”

Gregory looks into the fire before saying at length: “If only she wouldn’t have married that...that Spaniard. He never loved her.”

“I’ve heard it said that she doted on him. That must have been difficult.”

“It was. At least during the rare times he was actually around. The rest of the time she would pine, and I would cheer her and she would look at me, sometimes. I might be mad, but I think she regretted me.”

“Of course she did. And now she is gone and it feels like there is no point in carrying on.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I walked around like that for years after your mother died. It was like some kind of poisonous growth, a tumor. No one wants to look you in the eye once they know, so you keep it hidden as best you can.”

“I haven’t kept it to myself,” he says, pointing to his armband. “I don’t care who knows.”

“About that. Isn’t it time you put it off, son? If nothing else it’s a humiliation to your wife to make her wear one for her rival.”

“Did she put you up to this conversation? I saw you flirting with her at dinner.”

“Flirting?! She was humoring an old man. You should learn the difference.”

“You don’t know her. She is cunning and false.”

“If she is, then it is because you make her so. If she were reassured of you, she wouldn’t have to fight so to keep her place.” Lately he finds himself repeating his Mary’s words to him. He has no problem passing her advice off as his own. It is the best he can manage. He has seen for himself that Liz Cromwell is very often cunning and false. But if this Dukedom is ever to have an heir, his son has to spend the occasional night in her presence. Besides, there may be some truth to the advice. 

“We can’t all have your good fortune in wives.” 

“I suppose not. Sometimes you have to make your fortune. Have to give fate a hand along.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh nothing. You’ve done very well without my advice, thus far. Tell me, do you plan to stay on at court?”

“I don’t know. Elizabeth hasn’t asked me.”

“What is she like?”

“She is like her mother: quick-witted, sharp-tongued.”

“I look forward to meeting her.”

“Try to behave yourself.”

He laughs. “You sound like my wife.”

“And you? Do you plan to stay on, now that you’re back.”

The question catches him off balance. “I hadn’t planned on it. Should I?”

Gregory shrugs. The question hangs in the air as they say goodnight, as he shuffles up to his bed where Mary lies already sleeping.

**January 14, 1559**

They are presented as Master and Mistress Cromwell, Henry and Catherine as cousins of the Queen. Catherine never had the expectation of being received as a sister and Henry does not seem bothered by his demotion. That is Henry’s gift: he is resilient and nearly impossible to offend. A born courtier. 

Elizabeth sits in a chair in her mother’s apartments in the Tower of London. The light comes in dazzling behind her through the stained glass window, just as it did for her mother on the last day of his acquaintance with her. Master Secretary, William Cecil, stands nearby, frowning under the prongs of his beard. He, Cromwell, bows, a great effort nowadays. 

“Aunt and uncle,” the Queen says with a nod. He looks over at the once-bright mural. The deer and the park have faded over the years.“We understand you had it commissioned,” Elizabeth says. 

“Your mother’s apartments were renovated under my supervision. I know every brick, every cushion, every scrap of drapery.”

“Then you know it was her prison as well, in her final days.”

“I do. I came to visit her here, you know, that last day.”

She raises her brow. “Do tell us, what passed between you?”

He looks at Mary, whose eyes are wide and full of fear. Not to worry lass. He has not lost all his touch. He can still massage the truth.

“She was very calm and dignified. And she was kind to everyone.” And it is true, in a way: not understanding what was happening to her, she fell back on ceremony, on cordiality. 

Elizabeth looks pleased by this report. She nods and gestures to him to come stand nearer to her. As the next couple are announced his Mary and the others are swept to the side, part of the crowd gathering in the small room. 

“Leicester, have you met Master Cromwell?” she asks, she asks laying her hand on his arm with a light grip as her father used to do. Surely she can not remember seeing the gesture ever performed. It has been waiting within her, like a long fuse heading to gunpowder. His heart skips a beat as he follows Elizabeth’s eye where it rests on a tall, handsome man in a white doublet, covered in glittering pearls. Another drop-shaped pearl swings from the man’s ear.

“I have not, Your Majesty,” Leicester says, bowing to him.

“That is not strictly true, my lord. Though you perhaps do not remember.” He turns to face Elizabeth. “I held Robert Dudley in my arms when he was a babe of not more than a few weeks old.” The queen is clearly fascinated. He carries on: “And directly afterward went to my wife with such a glowing report that we set to work for ourselves. That is where we got the idea for my youngest daughter.” He speaks in a low tone, not wanting to mortify Mary and Hope. Elizabeth puts her hand over her mouth, laughing. 

“What is your job in the ceremony?” she asks, matching his conspiratorial tone.

“Job? None, Your Majesty. I’ll be sitting in the back with my son-in-law and the children.”

“That does not seem right, Cromwell. We will look into it,” she says and the next group is announced. Mary and the others are shown out and he follows after them, with only a darting look back at the Queen. He did not say, of course, that he held her in his arms as well. That she had been handed off to him on one of his many visits to Hatfield, to convince her older sister to bend to their father’s will. She had always made him think of Hope, of getting home. She has turned out well. A willingness to forgive and to laugh. These are both good signs. 

The next day a note arrives from the Master Secretary requesting that he assemble with the other ministers at seven bells on the morning of the 15th. It seems he never formally resigned any of his offices and, though he has been replaced, he has not been decommissioned. Until this technicality can be seen to, he is commanded to participate in the coronation progression. A black cloak can be provided for him if he has none. This last point makes him chuckle to himself and, though he thinks it unlikely, he can’t be entirely certain that William Cecil did not make a joke.

**January 15, 1559**

A few flakes of snow fall as they gather outside the Tower for the procession. He finds the current Master of the Rolls, Sir William Cordell -- one of Mary’s knights, -- hoping to hang on in Elizabeth’s court. He is only just behind his old friend William Paulet, Lord Treasurer. 

“My lord, it is good to see you again,” he says with a quick bow. Paulet does not recognize him right away, but then -- like someone blowing on a fading ember -- he suddenly comes to light.

“By the blood, Cromwell, what the devil are you doing here? We thought you were dead!”

“Not dead. In Italy.”

“That explains it. And this doublet as well. What is that?”

“Venetian silk”

“Venetian silk. What’ll they come up with next?”

“My son-n-law says ermine trim is the latest thing. He was greatly annoyed not to be able to bring his. He couldn’t understand that it is illegal to wear in England.”

Paulet nods, tapping his white staff of office. He, Cromwell, has always coveted the staff, if not the office. A white stick. No one fucks with you when you carry a white stick. 

The other ministers and members of the Privy Council are forming up ranks, shushing one another. Cecil and his man are moving through the crowd with a list, checking off names. He, Cromwell, does not belong next to the Master of Rolls. They are to walk two by two and he has made an unwelcome third. Cecil’s man moves him back with the clergy. There is no Archbishop of Canterbury at the moment, Reggie Pole having succumbed to illness only hours after Queen Mary’s death. He will fill in Pole’s gap. As he is about to take his place, Cecil takes him by the sleeve and leads him away from the crowd, out of earshot.

“Cromwell. You might be interested to know that I found the record of your visit to the Tower before Her Majesty’s mother’s death.”

“Did you think I would lie to the Queen? I know the record keeping at the Tower. I put it in place myself.”

“I had to check, you understand. One thing you did not mention was the letter you wrote on behalf of Her Majesty’s mother.”

“It didn’t seem the time to go into it.”

“Did it not? I would have thought it would be just the time. But perhaps you wanted to avoid bringing up your treasonous assertion that the lady should be spared execution because she was mad.”

“Was it treasonous to try and save the woman’s life by any means?”

“Are you saying she wasn’t mad? That you perjured yourself in a letter to the Crown?”

“I’m saying I wrote a letter meant to spare her life. I do not believe that Queen Mary ever saw the letter. UntilTill just now, I thought that it had been lost.”

“Your record keeping was too thorough for your own good, it seems.”

“What do you want, Cecil? In return for the letter?”

“Surely this is not the great Thomas Cromwell, master strategist, clumsily offering a bribe?”

“It is only clumsy if you don’t take it. In which case, I can simply say it was never offered.”

“True. And I could have you arrested. We could go back inside and only one of us will march in the progress. The other will remain in the Tower.”

“What would you gain by this? Locking up an old man and ruining Her Majesty’s day?.”

“Oh she would not need be told of it until later, after things have calmed down.”

“I suppose so. But I have a feeling there is something that you want from me.”

“As it happens, there is. And it is not land or title or money, though I will take those things from you if you refuse me.”

“What?”

“Your promise to leave England. And to never return.”

“Is that all? Such fuss for something I was going to do already. What made you think I’d planned to stay?”

“Oh nothing in particular. Just a feeling I got watching you with the queen the other day.”

“Bring me the letter and any copies and I will sign a paper promising never to return.”

“No need for that. I will take you at your word.”

“Do you really think me a fool? It would be as easy for you to hold this thing over my son, especially given his connection to Queen Mary.”

“Fair enough. I will have the document drawn up and sent over to you. Along with the letter. There is no copy.”

“Agreed.” 

“One more thing. I would like you to refrain from further conversation with the Earl of Leicester for the duration of your stay.”

He laughs. “Anything else? Any books I should be warned away from? Foods I should avoid?”

“It is a dangerous association. I do you a favor.”

“All right, all right. Do you want me to walk in this thing or not? I’m feeling tired and I’d just as soon have a rest in the Tower as stand here freezing any longer.”

“By all means, of course. Her Majesty wishes you to participate and I have no desire to stop you.” 

He rolls his eyes as he walks slowly back to his place next to the Archbishop of York, Nicholas Heath, lately Lord Chancellor under Queen Mary. Heath looks around nervously to make sure Cecil is long gone before saying, “What did Master Secretary want of you, Cromwell?”

“Just a bit of blackmail.”

“You too? I do not like being pushed around by that man. He has me by the hip or thinks he does. I was Mary’s Lord Chancellor, yes, but I was no great Catholic. He knows it.”

“Everyone knows it.” Heath was one of Henry’s young scholars sent out to find sympathetic Lutherans to side with them in the Great Matter.

“Indeed! While Cecil was still living with his wet nurse, I was meeting with Lutheran princes.”

“Young people today. Think they invented the world.”

“Tell me, Cromwell, do you plan to pay up?”

“I suppose I must. It is not a hard bargain anyway. More the principle of the thing. And a sign of my age that I am not much bothered by it.”

“Yes, I find myself caring less about remaining on the Privy Council. If it means being under his thumb.”

They start to move, settling into silence as the progression begins. It is a long, cold walk full of starts and stops. Over the years, his peculiar stride has changed to accommodate every new complaint of his aggrieved body, so that now it is a multi-part process involving complex shifts of balance. To the untrained eye it is a limp. He usually walks with Mary, a kind of reverse-chivalry where she supports him, towing him along when he gets tired. He looks through the crowd and sees Paulet’s staff poking up above the black hats. He eyes the object with even greater jealousy. He could use a walking stick.

In Gracechurch street a stage has been erected, upon which a living frieze portrays Elizabeth’s ancestry and her forebears’ most famous, -- or rather, most publicly-presentable -- deeds. Someone has hired actors to play Henry and Anne. They are quite uncannily good likenesses, not recreations of inaccurate portraits. They stop for a long moment as the progression has stalled ahead: a child is presenting the Queen with some doggerel written for the occasion. 

He looks up at “Henry” who is striking a regal pose. He has the stance down, which anyone could copy from Holbein’s picture, but also a certain casual way of putting his boot down on the earth as if he owned it, all of it. Surely this actor must have met the old king. “Anne” approaches the pantomime king and they dance slowly, never taking their eyes off of each other. He is reminded of their dance at the masque in Calais, all those years ago. He hears in his mind the jaunty, sad music, and perhaps it the sentimentality of old age, but he feels hot tears coursing their way down his cold cheek. 

+++

At dinner he is seated near Mary Howard, who treats him coldly, never suspecting that he once spent a winter chopping wood for her aunt’s fire. After her aunt died, she found there was some money for her, a mysterious benefactor. She was sent to court with her trusted maid, Angela. At some point he will probably walk around a corner and run into Angela. It will be a sport to see if she remembers him, to watch her head cock side to side while she works it out. 

That evening, Mary stands over him, fussing with the wrap around his shoulders as he sits by the fire in their room. He is tired and every part of his body hurts, but he is in high spirits.

“I want to give you a present, love,” he says, looking up at her with a half smile.

“What sort of present?” she asks, eying him suspiciously.

“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll tell you,” he says, patting his lap.

“What’s got into you?” she asks, perching on the arm of the chair. He reaches over and pulls her to him, biting her arm gently. 

“I don’t know. The day, perhaps. Old friends. New enemies.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“It was just a joke.” Perhaps not, though. It is not too late to get a man in Cecil’s office. Get those letters back by other means. 

“You are a grizzled old dog, Thomas, but I don’t half love you.”

He laughs. “You know what the Cardinal used to call you?”

“Nothing repeatable I’m sure.”

“An easy armful. I think he meant it as a dismissal, a judgement. But it always seemed a fine recommendation to me.”

“He was a terrible person,” she says, kissing his head. “But he was good to you, so I forgive him. And anyway, I think you model yourself after him.”

“Perhaps. With a dash of my own style.”

She is quiet a moment, shifts her weight on the arm of the chair. 

“Did you happen to see the frieze?” she asks.

“Mmm,” he nods. “Very good. Very like them.”

“I thought so too. God, Thomas, I looked up and saw her. My heart stopped.”

“I confess the sight of Henry…”

“Yes. And the dancing. It was eerie.”

“Do you miss her?”

“I do, yes. Sometimes I see a thing and think, Anne would appreciate that. But that is the way with all of them. I was so far away when it happened as to not feel it until much later. And even then it was not real somehow. I lit candles for them. I went through the motions, like I did with my uncle. But today, seeing her like that. Glorified. Suddenly I wasn’t ashamed to be a Boleyn anymore. It was a great relief. I finally felt like I could mourn her. All of them. Though they hurt me terribly, it is all right to mourn them. They did one good thing. They made Elizabeth.”

He is quiet. Thinking of Henry. His brother for a time. “You don’t want to stay here, do you? You still have family here. And Gregory needs me, I think..”

She shakes her head. “No, Thomas. Let’s go home. Gregory needs his wife. If you stay he will only go back to court, back to neglecting his duty.”

“They say she is bankrupt. Elizabeth. I could arrange loans.”

“You can do that from Florence.”

“True...”

“Let’s go to bed. See what happens, maybe?” she says tugging at his sleeve. She stands, groaning a bit after sitting on the edge of the chair. “I can’t believe you even entertain the idea of staying here. The weather alone…”

“It was just an idea.”

She helps him up from his chair and folds up his wrap. He sits on the bed. Swinging his feet up is a trial these days but Mary lifts up the covers and gives his legs a little push before going round to her side of the bed. She blows out the candles and climbs in with a little laugh.

“What?”

“You and your present. Sitting in your lap. One day I’m going to break your lap.”

“Is that a promise?”

“It is indeed.” He chuckles, drawing her close in the dark. Lying with her, a goose down beneath them, he feels free, his aches and pains floating just above his body. There is no sense of time or place in the dark, no expression but what flesh can feel on flesh. They are free to go back to the start of their life together: the warm room, the ship, the journey home.

**The End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my goodness, I can't believe we made it down this ridiculous, long road. Thank you Lynne for all your help. Your final edits/suggestions this week were invaluable as usual.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as ever to Onstraysod for her tireless beta/editing help.


End file.
